The Dragon and the George (16 page)

At Jim's left a rider suddenly vanished from his saddle; and for one insane moment it was Aragh riding the mount instead, his jaws grinning as he launched himself from the leather under him into another of the opposing riders—

All at once, it was over. Two or three of the mounted men-at-arms, and as many riderless horses, were dashing off. Aragh, on the ground now, was tearing out the throats of any who still lived. Jim checked himself, snorting heavily through his nostrils, and looked around.

Neither Aragh nor Brian seemed to have been touched. Danielle, Jim was glad to see, was still several houses down the street, approaching them at a walk, bow still in hand and an arrow ready but not strung. She had stood back, it seemed, sensibly, and used her weapon as it ought to be used—from a distance.

Jim looked down at his own forearms and body. He was covered with blood, some of which was probably his own; but he felt nothing. Within, he was conscious of two conflicting emotions struggling for ascendancy. The dragon in him was savagely disappointed that there were no more enemies to kill; the man felt as if he badly wanted to be sick.

"Hold still!" said Danielle. "How can I wash you off if you keep moving?"

He wanted to tell her that it was the dragon-adrenaline in him that was still making him twitchy. But he did not know how to explain this in terms she would understand. What had triggered him off had been a purely human horror at seeing the dead girl without hands, but after that he had been pure dragon.

Or had he? An impulse made him stop and question this. Perhaps not. Maybe he was in some ways as savage as Aragh, or Brian or those men he had killed.

"That's all right," said Danielle, having gotten him cleaned up. She was a competent, but not necessarily sympathetic, nurse. "You're cut up more than a little; but nothing important. Three or four of the cuts could use some oil and bandages. But if you keep them clean, they should all heal well, despite the lack. Don't roll in the dirt, Sir James."

"Roll? Why would I want to roll—" Jim was beginning, when Brian, who had been busy taking off his helm and gauntlets after retrieving his lance and checking it for damage, interrupted.

"It's plain to see," he said, "there's been no less than an attack on Malvern Castle. That lot of swine would not be foraying in such a manner unless the Malvern force at least were shut within walls and unable to sally. We'd best go carefully to get a look at the castle before we let the countryside know of our numbers and whereabouts."

"Catch me approaching any castle any other way." Aragh was standing nearby. Though his words were in character for the wolf, the tone was unusually mild. "And what if the castle is no longer in the hands of your lady? Shall we turn back?"

"Not far," Brian answered, tightly. His jaw muscles were lumped and the bones of his face seemed to stand out sharply under the skin. "If the castle is taken, I have a lady either to rescue or avenge—and that takes precedence over my desire to help Sir James. If unfriends indeed hold the castle, we must find another place for ourselves this night. There's an inn not too far off. But first, let's go see how matters stand with the castle."

"I can go and get back with no one seeing me," said the wolf. "Better the rest of you wait here."

"Those who got away might come back with help, if we stay here," put in Jim.

"Not with night coming on," said Brian. "Still, it won't be long until dark for us, as well. Perhaps it's best if you do scout the castle alone, Sir wolf. I and the others will head for the inn, to see if that's open to our using, or has been misused like this village. But wait—you don't know where the inn is."

"Tell me," said Aragh. "Though, given a little time, I could find it easily enough myself."

"Due west of the castle is a small hill with a crown of beech trees against the sky. If you look south from that hill's top, you'll see a place where the trees darken in a hollow, about two arrow-flights distant. You won't be able to see the inn, itself; but under those trees you'll find both it and the stream that runs by it."

"Soon," said Aragh, and was gone.

Jim, Danielle and Brian headed off through the wood, Brian leading.

"All this is familiar land to me," he explained. "As a boy I was a page here for three years, to learn my manners from Sir Orrin. My lady and I have walked or ridden over every foot of this ground, since."

The sun was setting now, and long shadows stretched out from the trees across the grass. They were not forbidding shadows, however, as they had been in Lynham forest, the night before. The evening hush lay on everything and, with half the sky overhead painted pink, for a moment the world about them seemed a different one from that holding the village they had just left.

But the moment passed. The light continued to fade and they came at last to a spot where Brian stopped abruptly, holding up his right hand to halt Jim and Danielle.

"The inn's just beyond these trees," he told them. "But walk and talk softly. Sound carries in this place, particularly when there's no wind."

They moved forward quietly together and gazed out from the shadows of the trees which the knight had indicated. They saw an open glade perhaps four hundred yards across at its narrowest. The stream Brian had spoken of to Aragh was ditched to flow completely around a long, stout building of logs, built in the center of the glade on a grassy mound of earth that seemed artificially raised within the circle of land. At the far end of the building—actually an extension of it—stood a sort of half-open shed in which two horses could be seen tethered, their heads in some sort of wall trough, feeding.

"The inn door's open, and the shutters are folded back from the windows," muttered Brian. "So they're not in a state of siege. On the other hand, it can hardly be a trap with men waiting for us inside, seeing there are only those two horses in the stable. Nor would these two feed so quietly if other horses had been taken off into the woods nearby to trick us. Those in the stable would be eager to get loose and join their stablemates. Nonetheless, we'd best wait for Aragh. Indeed I believed that, swiftly as he travels, he'd be here before us."

They waited. After only a few minutes, there was a movement behind, and Aragh was once more with them.

"Your fear's justified, Sir knight," he said. "The castle is barred and guarded. Also, I smelled blood spilled on the ground before the main gate, and the armed men on the walls talk of their lord, Sir Hugh."

"
De Bois
!" The name seemed to stick deep in Brian's throat.

"What other Sir Hugh could it be?" Aragh's red jaws laughed in the last of the light. "Rejoice, Sir knight! We'll both have our chance at him, shortly."

"Rejoice? With my lady no doubt in his hands, as well as her castle?"

"Perhaps she escaped," put in Jim.

"She's a de Chaney, and holds the castle for her father, who may be dead in heathen lands. She'd defend the castle to the death or her own capture." Brian's teeth clicked together. "And I won't believe in her death until I've had certain proof of it. Therefore, she's captured."

"Have it your way, Sir knight," said Aragh.

"I most surely shall, Sir wolf. And now, we need to scout this inn more closely to make sure it holds no trap for us."

Aragh's jaws laughed again.

"Did you think I'd come to meet you here without first taking a look at that box down there? I came up close behind it, before coming to you here, and listened. There's an innkeeper, his family and two men servants. Also one guest. And that's all!"

"Ah," said Brian. "Then we go in."

He started off and the rest of them caught up with him, walking openly across the glade in the last of the light; but a slight frown grew on the knight's face as they got closer to the ditch that separated them from the open front door.

"It's not like Master Dick Innkeeper not to be out of doors by this time to see who we are and what intentions we have," he said.

Nonetheless, he kept walking forward. His armored feet rang hollowly on the rough-hewn planks of the bridge crossing the ditch before the inn's door. He stepped onto the artificial island on which the inn was built, mounted its slight slope and walked into the gloom within, where what looked like a single torch had been lighted against the darkness. The others followed him in and found him stopped dead still, a pace inside the building.

He was staring at a lanky figure seated in a rough chair with his hose-clad legs propped up on the table before him. In one hand, the seated figure held the longest bow Jim had ever seen; and the other held an arrow loosely fitted to the string.

"And perhaps you'd better tell me who you are, now," the figure said in a soft tenor voice with an odd, musical lilt to it. "I can put an arrow through each of you before one of you could take a step, you should all know. But you do be seeming a strange pack of travelers to be together on the road, and if you have something I should be hearing, I'm prepared to listen, look you."

"I'm Sir Brian Neville-Smythe!" said Brian, harshly. "And you might think twice about whether you could put arrows through us all before one of us could reach you. I think I might just reach you, myself!"

"Ah no, Sir knight," said the man with the bow. "Do not be thinking of that armor of yours as something to make you different from the rest. At this distance the lady's doublet and your steel coat are the same as nothing to my arrows. The dragon a blind man could not miss, look you; and as for the wolf—"

He broke off suddenly, and laughed noiselessly for a second.

"It is a wise wolf, then," he said, "and a sly one as well. I did not even see him go."

"Master bowman," said Aragh's voice from out of sight beyond the open doorway. "You'll have to leave that inn, someday, and travel in the woods. When that day comes you'll be breathing without a throat before you can close your fingers on a bowstring, some moment when you least expect it, if either Gorbash or Danielle o' the Wold is harmed."

"Danielle o' the Wold?" The bowman peered at Danielle. "That would be this lady, now, whose face I cannot see any more than I can see the faces of you others, for the glare of the sunset light behind you. Would you be of some relation to a Giles o' the Wold, lady?"

"My father," said Danielle.

"Indeed! He is a man, then, and an archer—if report be true—whom I am most wishing to meet." The bowman raised his voice. "Rest you easy, Sir wolf. The lady will not be harmed by me, now; neither at this moment nor any other."

"Why do you want to meet my father?" Danielle asked, sharply.

"Why, to be talking to him about bowmanship," said the man at the table. "I am Dafydd ap Hywel, look you, a man of the longbow, the same which was first made and used in Wales, and which has since falsely come to be called an English weapon. So I am traveling about to teach these English archers that it is none of them can come near to matching a Welshman like myself, whether at mark or at rover, or at length of flight, or anything at all they wish to try with bow, string and shaft—and this because I am blood of the true bowmen, which they are not."

"Giles o' the Wold can outshoot you twice over, any day!" said Danielle, fiercely.

"I do not think he will, indeed," Dafydd said, gently, peering at her. "But I do have a great wish to see your face, lady—" He lifted his voice. "Innkeeper!" he called. "More torches, here! And you have more guests also, look you!"

A faint sound came of voices and footfalls farther back in the building; and then light spilled through the doorway in the shape of a square-bodied, middling-tall man of about forty, holding a burning torch in one hand and carrying three unlit in his other fist.

"Sir knight—lady—dragon…" he said, a bit breathlessly, and began to stick the unlit torches in wall sockets around the room and light them.

As the new flames flared up, Jim could see that Brian's face was hard.

"How is this, Dick Innkeeper?" he said. "Do you treat all old friends this way—hiding in the back of your inn until some other guest summons you forth?"

"Sir Brian, I—Forgive me—" Dick Innkeeper was obviously not used to apologizing; and the words came with difficulty. "But my roof is over my head and my family alive only because of this guest. You may not know it, messire, but Malvern Castle has been taken by Sir Hugh de Bois de Malencontri—"

"I know it," Brian interrupted. "But you seem to have been spared."

"Spared, we have been," said the innkeeper, turning from setting the torch from which he had been lighting the others into the last wall socket. The red light showed all their faces clearly now. "But only because of this bowman. It was two days since that he stopped here for the night; and early yesterday we heard horses outside and both went to the door to see fifteen or twenty men-at-arms riding out of the wood to my door."

" 'I don't like this,' I said to him, as we stood in the doorway together."

" 'Do you not, my host?' he answered; and, without saying anything further to me, stepped out of doors and called to them to come no nearer."

"It was no great thing," said Dafydd, from the table, on which his feet were still cocked, although he had now laid aside his bow and arrow. "They were a quarter of the way clear of the wood, and not an archer or crossbowman among them."

"Even so," said Brian, staring interestedly at him. "Dick spoke of fifteen or twenty, and all mounted. Not likely they'd stop at your word."

"Never they did," the innkeeper explained. "Whereupon he slew five of them in the time it takes me to draw a single breath. The others fled. When I went out to gather the bodies afterwards, every arrow was through the same place on each dead man's chest armor."

Brian whistled.

"My lady Danielle," he said, "it strikes me your father may have something to do in outshooting this man of the Welsh bow, after all. I take it, Dick, those fellows of Sir Hugh's haven't been back?"

"They may come if they wish," said Dafydd, mildly. "I am not a man of great dispute, but I have said they shall not come in here, and they shall not."