Rogue Dragon

V

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.

The raid had not been planned to free him, although that had been part of it. The raid had not been planned to pick up a dozen or so likely young women, although that had been part of it, too. (The women had shrieked and struck their captors and engaged in some semi-ritual wailing until cuffed into silence, but they seemed to have accepted their change in fortune serenely enough after not very long.)

“That Hue seems to think that nothing but what he wants, counts, me coney,” old Ma’am Anna had complained. “Well, now. How stupid do he think the Gentlemen are? They know that something doesn’t smell right, yesindeed. Sooner or later, they’re bound to come looking. Now, we North People, we mind our own business. And we do not want any troops and armies coming and poking around. Wars, you know, me boy, wars are catchy things.”

Boiled down, then, the raid had been intended to reestablish the status-quo before the city-states went to arms in order to re-establish it themselves. And, the dragons, she had said, were dead — dead in their enclosures behind the pit. Pausing with a piece of wild honeycomb in his fingers, Jon-Joras asked about that.

“How were the dragons killed, Ma’am Anna? I heard no gunfire. No one could have gotten a good shot by the torchlight, anyway. Besides, they were all marked wrong.”

She nodded, supped noisily from her bowl. After a moment, she wiped her toothless mouth, said, “That’s another thing, you see. Hue and his rogues. Rogue drags can be as bothersome as soldieries, yesindeed. I daresay he intends they all go downriver, towards the hunting country. I suppose he does his best to drive them so. But they don’t, me cockerel, no, they don’t always stay drove…

“How were they killed? Why, we poisoned them. Never mind what poison. Leave at least one of us be able to eat with an easy mind.” She bent over in a spasm of silent laughter.

Breakfast over, the day quite on its way and the sun warmer, Ma’am Anna had the curtains of the litter drawn back and relinquished a layer or two of her coverings. The signal horn sounded, and the nomads got on their way once more. Far off in the bosky distance a faint smudge showed in the air on the horizon. The black stones of the sinister, alien Kar-chee castle would not burn, but just about everything the outlaw Doghunters had carried into it was flammable.

“How did Hue get his scar, do you know?”

Her wrinkled lips came together in a pout. She shook her head. “That was bad, yesindeed. Someone with an — ix to the tail of his name — this was when Hue was just small of size — decided he didn’t find him meek enough. Maybe was drunk, too. However it was, he picked him up by the scruff and tossed him in with a dragon-cockerel that he happened to have around. The cockerel was bigger than Hue was… I don’t altogether blame the man. Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them.”

It was not a barn, exactly, which was burning back there. Her eyes followed his and, evidently, her thoughts, too. “Do they have dragons where you come from, coney?

“No. No, I suppose not. Because you never had no bloody Karches, did you, then? Lucky you. Did you know that they turn into Karches in the night-times? Yesindeed. So you be careful, hear me now, in wandering off in the dark. Particularly if we gets near unto The Bosky. Fierce, terribly fierce, is them Bosky drags.”

Jon-Joras, torn between his desire to hear more of this new aspect of the legend — the dragon as were-Kar-chee — and his desire to hear more of the almost unknown land beyond the official territories of the city-states, decided that if he let her talk he might well hear of both. Which he did.

The nomads apparently knew very well that the dragons were not Kar-chee. How Hue and Hue’s people had formed the notion that they were, Jon-Joras could not guess and didn’t now try. The notion that at certain times and in certain places the dragons shifted their shapes into those of the long since departed Kar-chee was perhaps, however, not much more scientific. If at all.

“… they even changes their smell, me cockerel,” old Ma‘am Anna hissed, wide-eyed in emphasis.

“I know how dragons smell, but how do… how did the—”

“The damned and bloody Karches? You knows that, too. You was in their castle for sure enough, yes indeed.”

Was that faint and alien odor that he had noticed, then, indeed that of the castle-keeping Kar-chee? Faint, faint, so very faint — yet still so distinct. The thought alone was capable of evoking it. Could it have lingered all these centuries? He could not say, could not begin, even, to conjecture. And, as for The Bosky—

Time and time again nomad bands had desired to graze their flocks on the rich and untouched grasses there. But the dragons were so incomparably fiercer in that region that it was long since any herdsmen had even thought of trying. Too, in times past, free farmers — individually and in groups and leagues — had endeavoured either to settle in The Bosky or at at least to pass through it in search of regions where the Syndics’ writs did not run. Where farm land might stay farm land and not become a target-alley or a parade-ground, where potatoes might stay where planted until harvested and not be dug up and trampled into muck because they had impinged on dragon ground. That curious and strange loving hate existing between hunters and hunted… Off, then, their gear and baggage laden aboard crude wagons and on pack-horses, did they have any; or bending beneath the weight themselves, did they have none, the free-farmers had set off for finding places where they might be free indeed and farmers indeed and need nevermore be “dirty doghunters” save on their own account.

“Some come back quicker than they went, young outworlder. It made them content to suffer what they’d suffered in discontent but where the dragons don’t fight unless they’re coaxed or goaded. I says, ‘It made them…’ What did? Why to see how terrible them awful Bosky drags tore up them as went before them. In their blood they saw them, yesindeed, mere bones and shreds,” Ma’am Anna sighed.

Jon-Joras caught at a word. “‘Some’ came back, you say—?”

“You mean, and what’s of the others? Isn’t it clear? Them as was found torn and scattered, was them that never come back.”

He frowned and mused. There was nothing utterly impossible in this account, nothing of the historical absurdity of confusing Kar-chee with dragon nor of the physical impossibility of the one turning into the other and back again, so. But there remained one considerable question which alone put the whole matter into doubt.

“Are the dragons any bigger or any different there than here?”

“Nope.” Ma’am Anna smacked her gums. “Just fiercer, like I say.”

“But…” And this was it: “Why should they be fiercer there? I mean, with no one to hunt them and bother them, you’d think they’d be less fierce, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, with inflexible logic; “because I knows they be more fierce. As to why, hee hum, old as I am and not fit for much, rather than go and maybe find out and be made into salad meat, by your leave, me coney, I’ll stay over here and in ignorance.”

And there the matter rested.

They were due to meet up with the main horde at about noon; and, at about noon, they did. The camp was, like a Gentleman’s seat, a small city-state of its own. Tents and lean-tos dotted the area for about a mile, the small animals from which the fleeces evidently came milled and bleated, and ponies by the thousands — so it seemed — grazed in hobbles. And in the center was the great circular tent which was the Ma’am’s capitol.

“Mutton!” she directed, as she was being lifted down.

“I want me fat mutton — grilled and crisp and chopped fine!”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“And tomorrow I want the flocks taken up to the white stony brook — that was all burnt over a while back, should be nice, fresh grazing.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“Tomorrow. Not today. Today I want the children to go up there instead. Have ’em bring all the buckets and baskets — there’ll be good berrying there.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

They set her down on a pile of fleeces and blankets raised off the floor, propped her up with pillows.

“Did Cuthy beg Brun’s pardon, publicly, like I said?”

“He did, our Ma’am.”

“Paid him twelve goats, too?”

“Twelve goats, our Ma’am. He wanted to include a wether, and Brun wouldn’t have it, but the Elders said a goat was a goat, so he took it, rather than do without.”

She nodded. “That’s right. There’s many a buck with stones that does the nannies no good; this way he won’t have to wonder… Teach Cuthy to leave Brun’s woman alone. All right! All right! Get out, now! Stop vexing me old head with all your questions. Bring enough mutton for the outworld boy, too. Come sit… of whatever way is comfortable for you… over by me. Now, then—”

She took his hand. “We’ll be here long enough for you to mend. What do you think on doing, once you can ride. again?” He said that he thought he’d rather not ride again at all, asked if she couldn’t send a messenger for a flyer to take him back to Peramis. “Ah, me cockerel, but isn’t that part of the question? What do you think on doing, once you’re back in Peramis?”

Seeing that he was still not understanding her, she explained in detail. What did he plan to say about things? The rogue dragon… the mysterious, secretive Kar-chee castle and what it contained… the nomad raid… He began to catch her drift; asked what she thought he should say.

Slowly, the old head nodded.

“That’s the point. Yesindeed, that’s the point. You see, me coney, few things are ever simple. If you go back and talk free, then the wasp’s-nest is stirred up for sure. The armies come out. We don’t want that, for our own reasons. And when the armies are out of the States, what’s then? Riots, I hear, in Peramis. Put down by the army. Maybe the Dogrobbers would just as soon sacrifice their tricks off in the woods, for a chance to burn things up.”

He had to agree that it was not simple. Certainly, he could not forget what had been done to the son of Aëlorix, his former host, to whose salt he assuredly owed something. Certainly, he could not deny that the outlaws had just grievances. More: they, too, had been his hosts. Finding him wandering near their secret place, they had been justified in taking him prisoner; but they had treated him with kindliness, once he was safe inside.

“Is Hue still alive?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The men told me they saw him go down, before they had to withdraw. But they’re not sure he wasn’t in shape to get up again. Why?”

He told her why. “‘They shall all be killed, every one — in the egg, and out…’”

“When things reach such a stage,” Jon-Joras said, “the right which is based on having been wronged becomes a wrong in itself.”

The old woman stooped her chin upon her hands. She sighed. “Well… Well… We have to think. Both of us. But not now. Here they are with the mutton. If there is one thing I don’t have to puzzle about, it’s mutton,” she said, contentedly. “I like it fat. And I like it crisp.”

From time to time in the next few days, Jon-Joras thought about his forcibly neglected duties. He knew that Por-Paulo would not blame him or think less of him; besides, the Hunt Company was experienced enough to fill the gap well enough in making arrangements. Meanwhile, there lay open before him the life of the nomad encampment, utterly strange to him except as a half-forgotten paragraph in half-forgotten books. In a way it was far freer than any life he had ever known, but it was subject nonetheless to the sway of law. The tribesmen elected their council of elders and over the elders was the old queen, Ma’am Anna, who ruled them all as the benevolent semi-despotic matriarch of a family. But even old Anna had to go where the grass was green and the water was sweet; even she could not prevent storm and snow and flood and disease.

She gave Jon-Joras a pony, as casually as she might give a child a sweet; the tribe had plenty of ponies, after all (she said), and she could not burden her litter with him forever. He thanked her for the gift — somewhat fearfully, remembering how sore he had been from his first ride — and somewhat reluctantly, realizing that this probably meant he was not going back to Peramis in the immediate future. But there was nothing he could really do about it… except make the most of it.

He learned how to ride the shaggy little beast, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence and enjoyment, over the low swelling hills and flatlands fresh with new herbage; only a fleecy pad for a saddle, only a braided grass rope for a bridle, the sweetsmelling wind in his face instead of the strong musty odor of sheep which hung around the camp site.

Sheep and shepherds alike fell behind him as, food in his saddle-sack and water in his leather bottle, he set as his goal some distant landmark — a wooded hilltop, a pond glittering in the sun, a valley opening wide in welcome — and headed for it. No one, least of all Ma’am Anna, seemed concerned about his possibly not returning, any more than his earlier hosts, the outlaws, had been. He was after all as bound by his limited knowledge of the terrain as by the encircling high black walls around the castle of the swarming, conquering, and now-vanished Kar-chee.

Both Jon-Joras and the tribesmen, however, were in this guilty of one mutual mistake. Both realized that he did not know enough about the countryside to escape successfully. Neither realized that he knew little enough about it to get lost successfully. But he did.

Born and raised upon the infinitely controlled planet which was M.M. beta, where everything was so complex as to be simple, so controlled, so subdued, so organized, that even a blind man could hardly lose his way; Jon-Joras — despite theoretically knowing better — did not consider the possibility that one wooded hill, one pond, one valley, might well look just the same to him as another. He had always found his way back successfully before. If by nothing else, he guided himself automatically by the almost tidal regularity of the flocks and herds as they drifted back, campwards, as the day drew to a close.

He never thought to ask, and no one thought to inform him, that the lands towards which he rode that day had been so thoroughly grazed that the flocks and herds had been diverted from them, sent elsewhere. Once outside the perimeter of the camp Jon-Joras rode through empty fields — but this meant nothing to him. He noted the brook to leftwards, and headed in its general direction. But much broken land lay between them, and the source of the stream was in one of the many declivities he was bound to avoid. So when, at last, he finally saw a brook to his left, he did not realize that it was not the same brook but another and a farther one. Guiding himself by its course, eventually he turned the pony’s head and began (so he thought) to ride back towards the encampment.

The cooling air and the still-empty landscape told him of his escape. But it was an escape as useless as it was inadvertent, one of which he could make no use. He had no idea of where he was, none of where he wanted to go, and (he realized with some surprise) little of even where he wanted to be. There on the hilltop in the sallow light of lowering day, M.M. B seemed infinitely far off in space and time and reality, Peramis was the mere thin fabric of a dream, and the encampment of the tribe little more than a setting from a 3D drama or travelogue.

He sighed. After a moment he began riding his mount in a slow circle on the rise of ground. He saw nothing and nothing and yet nothing. Sunshine and clouds wheeled in counter-circles, slotted shafts of light broke through the gathering dusk, and in one such thrust of brightness he saw three small figures riding along far away and below. He thumped the pony in the ribs and rode towards them.

They were long in hearing him, indeed, it was only after he ceased to call after them that they turned around, perhaps having heard the sound of the hooves… perhaps not even having precisely heard them… but become somehow aware of… something. However it was, they turned, drew reign, awaited him.

They were three in number — one was an older man, one was a younger man, one was a woman. To be more exact, a girl. To be even more exact, the girl who had repulsed his assistance in the mob scene before the Hall of Court… the girl whom he had seen and who had fled from him in the woods between the fatal coming of the great rogue dragon and his capture by the outlaw Doghunters.

She had said something upon seeing him now and, obviously, recognizing him; something swift and low-voiced to her companions. And then for a long while, all four of them riding through the long, slow twilight over the empty plains, she said nothing, but slumped her chin into the blue cloak whose folds enveloped her.

The older man was a swart, stocky, grizzle-bearded fellow, his knees stuck out at angles from the sides of his thin gaunt horse. He wore a long cloak of the same blue as the girl, but, cast half aside, it revealed a garb of greasy buckskin beneath. Gold rings glittered in his hairy ears. His male companion was something else altogether — young, slender, upright and trim… elegant was the word which occurred to Jon-Joras. His tunic was Gentleman’s white, his trousers the elaborate embroidered affair worn on festivals by tribesmen, and his cloak — arranged with elaborate neatness so as to leave his arms free — was fastened across his chest with a silver chain and clasp. A bracelet of gold chased-work encircled a wrist held out as stiff and proud as if it bore a hawk.

At length the elder cleared his throat and spat. He scratched himself reflectively. “I’ve been thinking on what you said before, Henners,” he observed. “And I can’t see that I agree, no, not one bit. There is nothing at all wrong with the triolet.”

“Nonsense, Trond,” Henners said, vigorously. “It is archaic, contrived, artificial, jejeune — and anything else you like. It altogether lacks the simplicity and directness of the couplet, neither does it lend itself to amplified assonance and alliteration.”

Trond screwed his face up into a truly hideous squint, compounded with a frown. “But the couplet”—the last word exploded into an enormous eructation—“the couplet is so monotonous!”

And so they rode on, as the air turned blue and the sky went purple and the first tiny stars appeared, discussing different modes and meters of poetry; and finally the bright and dancing light of a fire shone before them. And another, and another. Voices haled them, figures rose and crowded around. The girl dismounted, someone took her horse, she vanished from Jon-Joras’s sight.

“Fellow poets,” said Henners, gesturing, “allow me to present our guest, one Jon-Joras by name, an outworlder and sometime semi-captive of those coarse persons, the Northern Tribe. I think we may be of some small assistance to him in the matter of getting him back to a state… and I think we will find him not ungenerous, hem, hem, in the matter of expenses. Well! Are we not to eat and drink before falling to the making of new verses and rhymes, the chief end of such portion of mankind as dare deem itself civilized?”

Invitations were at once shouted, the guest was assisted from his pony and led to a seat by the largest of the fires, where a pair of lambs were grilling on a spit over a bed of coals. Someone thrust a goblet into his hand, of some drink which managed to taste both sweet and acid at the same time; and strong, and smelling of honey.

“First verse!” a voice close to him called. Others took it up. “First verse! Guest! Outworlder! First verse!”

The realization that he was to compose, instant and impromptu, a short poem, found Jon-Joras with an empty mind. Empty, that is, of everything except the feeling that there was something odd about the lambs which were becoming supper. He held up his hand, the crowd became silent. He spoke:

The briefest of quiets followed the recitation. Then it was swallowed up in a burst of laughter. Someone pounded him on the back. Someone poured more drink into his golden goblet. And someone on the other side of the fire, whose face he could not distinguish, started a reply.