Rogue Dragon

II

Although the 3D scoping equipment here on Prime World was as good as anywhere in the multi-world Confederation (“the lands of the Starry Compact,” as Por-Paulo had called it in a speech — inwardly wincing, so he confided in Jon-Joras, at the purple phrase), the local economy did not run to any viewing system: the Hunt scenes could be shown off-world, not there. Communications were non-visual. Some faint reflection that 2D was surely at least possible had engaged Jon-Joras’s mind, but not for long. Prime World was, as far as the Hunt Company was concerned, chiefly a game preserve; had been little more for centuries. The hand of the Confederation rested lightly, very lightly here. What was good enough for the Hunt Company in this now remote and passed-by globe seemed good enough for the Confederation.

The face of the communicator was nothing but an instrument board, and Jetro Yi, when he called in as directed next morning, was nothing but a voice.

“I’m lining up one of the best Hunters for your principal, P.M.,” he said, in his usual important tones. “A Gentleman by the name of Thuemorix. One of the best—”

“That’s good, Company.”

“He’s promised to draw us a prime bull. A five.”

“How’s that?”

“A five. Dragons are at prime at five years. After that, well, they begin to go downhill. And before that, too green. I mean, huh-huh, literally as well as figuratively, huh-huh. How would it look for your king to come back with a skin that anyone who knows anything, well, they could at one glance just tell by the color that he hadn’t had a first-class hunt? Wouldn’t look good at all. You take some of these pot-bellied parvenus, come here in a hurry, all they want is the prestige, well, huh-huh, if they draw a hen-dragon or an old crone, who’s going to know the difference, the circles they move in; skin could be pea-green or rusty-black. But not for your principal, no sir, nothing to worry about.”

And he pumbled on and on. There was nothing immediately requiring Jon-Joras’s attention. In a few days he expected to have a lodge lined up for him to look at, to be let with staff while the owners went south on a long visit. “But nothing immediate. So just enjoy your stay with His High Nascence.”

“All right, Company.”

“And I’ll report tomorrow morning.”

“All right, Company.” He flicked off before Jetro Yi could give a resume of all the face-to-face conversations he had had with Jetro Yi. When you had heard him once you had heard him forevermore — unless you had a boundless appetite for the commerce of the hunt.

Leaving the communicator, he strolled at ease through the charming, rambling house out towards the by-buildings in which he knew he would find his host inspecting the livestock. Aëlorix was in the deer-sheds, greeted him with a wave of his hand towards a fat gray doe that was being washed around the udders prior to milking.

“Beauty, isn’t she? Won two prizes.”

“I must accept that judgment, sir. We have none like this out my way, on M.M. beta.”

“No, I suppose not… This your king’s first hunt?”

Jon-Joras tentatively stroked the doe’s soft muzzle. It was Por-Paulo’s first dragon hunt, yes. (“That’s the only kind that counts,” his host said firmly, with the self-contained assurance of an untraveled provincial.) Jon-Joras described Por-Paulo’s three quests for sundi in the swamps of Nor, before his first election — the absolute protective coloration of the sundi — how (so the king had described it) it seems as if a triangular piece of swamp suddenly hurtles through the air. “It’s not a game for the slow, sir. Instant reflexes, or death.”

“Mmm…”

“He’s gone five or six times for dire-falcons, too, out of the aeries of Gare. A thousand, two thousand feet up, if you miss—”

“Mmm…” Insecurely mounted on one winged creature and aiming at another, fiercer one, as it swoops and spins and dives, hooked beak and razor talons. But all Aëlorix said was, “Mmmm… I don’t deny there seems to be an element of danger. But you can get that, you know, from all I hear (oh, wouldn’t go myself if you paid me), just trying to cross a road in one of the populous planets. No. A hunt, you see—”

They left the deer-shed, host courteously leading guest by the wrist, and crossed a wide place of beaten earth. “—is not a mere matter of danger. Not a dragon hunt, at any rate. It’s a matter of ritual, art, music, skill, color, tradition. There’s more to it than just exposing yourself to a chunk of mud with teeth in it. And this is an acknowledged fact. Ask any Company man, ‘What’s your most popular, most sought-after, most expensive hunt?’ One answer. ‘Dragon.’ It was true, this last. Jon-Joras said nothing.

“Furthermore—” and here Aëlorix suddenly ceased looking rather pontifical, and exceedingly grim, “furthermore, these other items of game (if so you call them), what are they to those that hunt them? Nothing, really. Trophies. Mere sport. Nothing more. Whereas, the dragons,” his mouth curled down, “we hate them. Don’t be in any error about that. We hate them!”

This came as completely surprising to Jon-Joras, for nothing he had heard previously and nothing in Aëlorix’s voice as he had discussed them earlier, had prepared him for this sudden emotion. It was as though the man had just remembered… and remembered a most unpleasant memory, too.

“Why?” he asked, astonished.

With a grimace and an abrupt gesture, the Master said, “It was the Kar-chee… They were the Kar-chee’s dogs. They hunted us. Now we hunt them.” Then the mask dropped again and he said, pleasantly, “Come and see how the training’s coming on.”

Jon-Joras, wondering mightily but saying nothing, yielded to the friendly hand upon his back, and walked on as desired.

On one side of the wide place a group of young, naked-chested archers were shooting at training targets. An elderly bowmaster with stained white moustachios walked up and down behind them, a switch in his hand. The targets hung high in the air and swayed in the wind; whenever a cadet made what was deemed too bad a shot—whisshh! — the switch came down across the lower part of the back. “Mm—hm,” the Gentleman signified his approval. “Nothing better for the aim. Notice how careful old Fae is never to catch the shoulder-muscles. Ah… I see my boy’s had one miss already this morning. Let’s see if he has another.”

They paused. Aëlorix’s younger son, a chestnut-haired boy in his middle-teens, stood in his place at line, a thin red wheal marking his skin just above his belt. The old man barked, the boy whipped out an arrow, raised his bow, let fly. Jon-Joras could not even see where the shot landed, but his host made a satisfied noise. The bowmaster paced his slow way down the line, said not a word of praise.

On the other side of the field several squads of bannermen danced about with bare poles. A sudden thought entered Jon-Joras’s mind, passed his lips before he had time to consider if it were polite to mention it. “Isn’t this sort of an establishment expensive to maintain?”

“In my case, yes, because I like to see my people here at home, not hired out for Hunts all over the place. And I don’t take Hunt contracts, myself. Don’t have to. My older boy won’t have to, either. But I suppose the younger will, unless I divide Aëlor’ in my will, and I won’t. Don’t believe in it. Keep estates in one piece. I’ve got a smaller place up the river and he shall have that, and I’ll start him off with a small establishment of his own. The Company will see that he gets a few good contracts until his reputation firms up. (That’s where most of your best Hunt Masters come from: younger sons, you know.) The Company knows me, I know the Company. Hate to think if we had to depend on Confederation.”

He did not elaborate, but added, a trifle defensively, “Not that we, not that I, have to depend on the Company, either. Far back as memory goes, this family has never had to buy a haunch of venison, a peck of potatoes, or an ell of common cloth. Show me a Gentleman that does and I’ll show you a family going down hill,” he rambled on, proudly. “That’s how Roedeskant got his estate, you know. Family that had it, never mind their name, extinct in the male line, anyway; they went down and he went up. Well, he earned it, I credit him, yes. Council of Syndics shall change his name to Roedorix at the next Session, or I’ve lost all my influence and shall engage myself as a Doghunter.”

They paused for him to watch the fletchers at work and to test a new batch of arrowheads with his thumbnail along the edges. He poked into a pile of potatoes and satisfied himself that the ones underneath were as good as those on top. He sampled the cheeses and sausages and the apples to see that they were being properly stored, and was en route to the armory to show Jon-Joras his huntguns, when a party of several coming towards them through a grove of trees sighted them and called out.

“Chick-boys… what are they doing back so soon?”

The boys — some of them actually were boys, shock-headed imps with gaptoothed grins, never having known a day’s school or a pair of shoes; others were all ages up to gray-beards who had been boys forty years ago — beckoned their lord and set down what they were carrying. These, as Jon-Joras came up, proved to be wicker baskets, covers tied on with ropes of grass; from within them came a shrill twittering sound.

“What’s up, boys.”

All talking at once, they undid the baskets. “Ah, now, Nasce‘, looka here at these beauties—” “Isn’t they a fine lot, Nasce’?” “Have a eye on’m, won’t y‘, Nasce’—” They held up about a dozen young dragons, deep yellow with just a faintest tinge of green along the upper body in some of them.

“Very nice, very nice,” Aëlorix said, brusquely. “But if you’ve slacked off searching just to show me a batch of chicks — No. You wouldn’t. What’s up?”

They fell silent, eyes all turning to one man who stood by the sole unopened basket. He opened it now, reached in gingerly, winced, lunged, and drew out something which brought a roar from his lord. “What in blethers are you dragging that back for? It’s not a chick, it’s a cockerel — do you have six fingers and want to lose one? — and a marked cockerel too! What—?”

The man with the gawky dragon-child needed both of his hands to hold it, but another man pointed to the mark, the gray X on the underside which would grow whiter with age. Aëlorix bent over, silently, to examine it as the chick-boy nudged the scaly under-hide with his scarred thumb, and the dragon-cockerel chittered and snapped at him.

The Gentlemen snapped up straight, his face red and ugly, criss-crossed with white lines Jon-Joras had not noticed before. “What son of a dirty crone marked that?” he cried. His rage did not surprise his men.

“Marky? Marky?”

An old — a shambling old chick-boy — whose incredibly acid-scarred hands testified to the contents of the ugly can he carried, shook his head slowly and sadly, eyes cast down. It might have been over the sorrow of a ruined grand-daughter.

“Not my stuff, Master Ae,” he said. “Nope. That’s a coarse, karchen stuff, very coarse, y’ see.” He prodded it with a caricature of a finger. “See how deep it’s cut? I dunno a marky ’round here, ’r north, ’r south, who makes ’r uses stuff like such. And look where he put ’n, too, the dirty son of a kar-chee’s egg—”

“Yes,” his master said, bitterly, “Yes, look. Cut its throat,” he ordered, abruptly, and stalked away with quick, angry steps. Suddenly he stopped and turned back. “Not a word to any one! The Ma’am is not to hear of this.” It was a long few minutes before his breathing calmed enough for him to say to his mute guest, “Young man, you must amuse yourself for a while. I must counsel with my neighbors on something. Pray pardon and excuse.”

But the Ma’am had already heard. Her weeping was loud as Jon-Joras came into the house. He thought it was best to make excuses of demanding duties, and to depart. It was not urged that he change his mind.

Peramis was not much different from other of the city-states of Prime World, that ancient planet from which the race of Man had begun its spread across the galaxies. It had stripped itself bare, exhausting its peoples and minerals, in launching and maintaining that spread. So it was that, population dwindled and resources next to nil, at a time when the son-and daughter-worlds were occupied in their own burgeoning imperialisms, old Earth had had to stand alone when the Kar-chee — the black, gaunt, mantis-like Kar-chee — came swooping down from their lairs around the Ring Stars. Alone and almost defenseless. And, defenseless (in all save their native wit) and alone, what remained of her people had had to fight their way up. Small wonder the very name of the conquerors had, in its corrupted but still recognizable form, become a common curse.

The establishment of Confederation, and a belated recollection of and attention to the first home of man, found scarcely a remnant of the old status still remaining. Gone were the great cities, gone the great states and leagues of states. There might have remained even less than a little, had not the Kar-chee been perhaps more interested in the sea than in the land. In response to impelling plans and reasons known only to themselves, masses of land had been blasted and submerged; others had been heaved up out of the primordial muck. Rivers had been changed in their courses, mountains laid low, mountains raised high.

The old maps were of limited use, where useful at all; and Jon-Joras, gazing at the slow-turning, giant model globe in the lobby of the Lodge, was obliged to forget his ancient history. That done, it was no great feat to locate Peramis, Sartor, Hathis and Drogue, the four city-states which — nominally, at least — divided between themselves the land-mass (more than a peninsula, less than a subcontinent) most frequented these days by those bound on dragon-hunts. And beyond was the uninhabited terra incognita called “The Bosky.”

Aëlorix of Aëlorix had been right enough in his way. Dragon might perhaps not be the deadliest game, but they were the most prestigious. In ancient legends, preserved in richest form in the worlds of the Inner Circle, those first settled in the great wave of expansion, there were references to dragons. They did not seem to fit the present-day creatures at all. One theory had it that the dragons of the mythic cycles had retreated deep into forests and jungles (or, perhaps, the depths of the seas) and so escaped the attention of reputable historians, evolution… mutation… accounting for the apparent changes. Had the rupturing of the deeps, perhaps, brought them forth again? Jon-Joras wondered.

Others would insist that the Kar-chee brought the beasts with them, pointing to the existence in all their ruined “castles” of great sunken amphitheaters which the remnants of Man on Earth united in calling “dragon-pits.”

One thing alone seemed fairly certain despite all the several theories: Before the Kar-chee came, if there were dragons on Prime World, no one knew of it. And by the time the Kar-chee ceased to trouble, the presence of the dragons was one of the great realities of Terrene life. Somewhere, somewhen during the Kar-chee Reign and the chaos, the mystique of the dragon-hunts had developed. And by now, centuries after, it was the only resource of the despoiled planet. Whatever the explanation, it was all very strange, indeed.

“Odd to think we all came from there,” someone, pointing, said over Jon-Joras’s shoulder as he stood musing before the circling globe.

He nodded, half-turned. It was the Confederation archaeologist, a certain Dr. Cannatin, whom he had, from time to time, heard lamenting in bar-lounge or Lodge-lobby the effort involved (and the money!) in dredging up a single artifact of the ancient days — or rejoicing on the latest one he had nevertheless managed to find.

“How is your new dig coming along?” Jon-Joras asked politely.

Cannatin, middle-aged, and fat, and depilated according to the custom of his native world (wherever it was), looked rather like an ambulatory egg. His round mouth made a grimace. “Hardly getting anywhere at all. The plebs… that’s not what they call them here, is it? No matter. Dog-robbers? Doghunters. Free farmers, as they like to be called — hard people to deal with. They would rather dig potatoes than build sites. Hunt ruins? Rather hunt dogs. And I have to pay through the nose when I can get them, too.” He sighed.

“I’m thinking of giving up around here, setting up a base camp on the far side of the river, near Hathis.”

Jon-Joras asked if the lower class in Hathis was more amenable to archaeology, and Cannatin shook his naked head. “Not thinking of them, I’m thinking of the nomads. The tribespeople. There’s a few of their main trails converge over that way. Now, these people going wandering in and out and all around. They must know of sites nobody’s even heard of. So I’m moving. And soon—”

The sudden note of urgency surprised Jon-Joras, but before he could inquire, Cannatin, with a mumbled excuse, hurried away. Jetro Yi was not at the Lodge, so Jon-Joras thought he would look for him at the Hunt Company’s offices, seeing more of the “state” en route. A number of pony-traps in the road outside the spacious lodge grounds solicited his custom, but he preferred to walk. Usually the streets in this part of Peramis town were quiet, with few pedestrians; but scarcely had Jon-Joras crossed through the park at the next crossroads when he began to hear crowd noises.

A bend in the stately, tree-lined promenade brought him in sight of the throng, moiling around on the wide mall in front of an important-looking building with a white plastered portico. He had seen its picture in the Company’s travel brochures, reduced to miniature, clients not being much interested in the local architecture; but for a moment he could not recall what it was… the State Hall?… the Chamber of the Board of Syndics?

A blind beggar squatting on the pave lifted his head as Jon-Joras approached. “No room in the Court, your Big,” he croaked, raising his cupped palms and asking a donation. Jon-Joras gave him something and, wondering at the crowd, asked what was going on in court. The beggar canted his head as if to assure himself that no one else was near, said, “Ah, your Big, it’s that dirty Doghunter what killed the Gentleman. For why? Claims the Hunts people trampled his ’tato patch. Course they paid ’n for it, always does. But them Doghunters is mean greedy, never gives nothing to a blind man, wanted more, he done. Gentleman gives him a piece of stick to bite on, they fights and he kills ’n. Terrible thing, your Big…”

Jon-Joras left him whining and walked on to the mall. A small group of Gentlemen were standing close together in earnest talk; one of them, with repeated angry gestures towards a larger clot of plebs, seemed urging some sort of action. Jon-Joras’s path led him athwart the larger group, and he paused a ways away to listen.

“—dirt, less than dirt,” a burly man in a greasy buckskin which left half his broad, hairy chest exposed, was saying. “First comes their own kind, then comes their bloody dragons, then comes their damned servants what kisses their backsides, and then comes their pishy customers from out-worlds. Out-worlds! Did out-worlds help us when the Kar-chee come?” His hearers growled and shifted. “And as for us, ‘Less than dirt,’ I says. We is good enough to hunt the wild dogs in the woods to keep things safe, but no more’n that. ‘Free farmers,’ we calls ourselfs. Hah! How free c’n we be when our fields what we plants with sweat is no more to them than a path to run on or a wastegrounds to tromple on?”

Times there are when the much goes slow and the little, quick; but now it was that the much went quick — and quicker yet. A cry echoed down the mall, all heads turned, nearer, near, from the Court: “Guilty! Guilty! Death!” A shout, fiercely triumphant, from the Gentlemen — the man in the buckskin hurled himself upon them — in an instant the mall was a mass of bloody turmoil into which Jon-Joras felt himself carried away. He struck out, was struck back at.

The crowd, now become a mob, surged back and forth. He fell on one knee, lifted his arms to ward off being trampled on. But the mob had swarmed elsewhere. For the moment he was safe, and then, looking around as he began to rise, he saw the girl on the ground to his right. She was slender and slight and pale, a trickle of blood upon her face.

He started to lift her up. She opened her eyes, her face convulsed with rage; she struck at him, leaped away free. In another moment she was lost in the screaming crowd.