Rogue Dragon

IV

There had been no ponies on MM beta. It seemed to Jon-Joras that there was no longer any skin on the inside of his thighs. His hands were now free, but his feet were bound instead, by a line passing under the pony’s belly. The dogs loped alongside, from time to time looking up at him — hungrily, it seemed. Their eyes glowed red in the torch-light. He did not remember dozing off, but when he snapped awake, two men who had been holding his arms on either side withdrew.

The uncertain flaring light showed nothing that told him where he was. Not on the interminable path any more, for certain; it was not wide enough for three men to ride abreast. One of the riders grunted, pointed. Another, nodding, said something which vanished into a yawn. Jon-Joras, following the gesture, saw a great black block of rock canted at an angle. Vines grew over it. There was another. And another. The soft thudding of the ponies’ hooves suddenly began to echo, the air was instantly closer. They were in a tunnel of some sort; a tunnel which wound around and around, always up-hill. The smell was faint, but it was an alien smell, and he shuddered at it.

A wave of cool air washed his face; the echo vanished. Stars were overhead, but only overhead… not to the sides. He felt, rather than saw, the encircling wall which must be there. Where this place was, and what this place was, he had no idea. But he felt certain that it was never built by the men who held him captive.

The hunt itself had taken toll of him a drain of nervous energy equivalent to many days hard work; his long walk, his flight from the dogs, the ride… He fell from the pony, but the pain (as they loosed his bonds) seemed academic. His body was being hurt, but he — Jon-Joras — was not his body. Vaguely, he was aware of being half-carried down a long, winding ramp into a room where torches blazed in sockets on walls so high he did not see the tops. Food was set before him, he ate, nodded, slumped onto the tables. Men stripped him of his trousers, rubbed his sore skin with curiously-scented salve. He fell asleep again while this was being done.

But even in his sleep he heard the hissing, heard the low, almost melancholy call of the dragon.

He awoke on a pile of hides and rushes, sunlight streaming through a window very high up. He blinked. It was not a window, but a breach in the smooth black wall that went up and up and up…The room he was in was not quite a wall, but a partition of planks which scarcely reached higher than his head. He began to get up, stopped, with a sharp cry of pain.

Every muscle seemed sore — including muscles the existence of which he had not known before. He thought that a hot bath might relieve the soreness in tendons and ligaments, as well as remove the grime and dried sweat — but he feared what it might do to the raw skin on the inside of his upper legs. And, at any rate, where in this place — half improvised camp, half ancient ruin — could he expect to find a hot bath?

The answer came sooner than he expected. A fat, toothless old woman came bustling in with a bowl of hot water and a rag. “You’ll have to get up now,” she said. “I’m going to be needing this room to sort my potatoes. Wash up and get along.”

If this were a prison, it was an odd and informal one. He winced, but was glad of the wash, such as it was. “I don’t know where to get along to,” he said, scrubbing gingerly. The old woman said that this wasn’t her problem. So, carrying the trousers he didn’t dare to try to put back on, he wandered out into the hall which sloped down between the partitions. Again the light coming through the hole far up caught his attention. He followed the shaft of sunlight to where it lit on the opposite wall, and it was there that something struck his attention.

It appeared to be a frieze; high up as it was, and at a bad angle, obscured by dirt and cobwebs in places, he could not clearly make it out. But one figure seemed to leap into focus. It was not a human figure. With a blink and a shudder, he understood. He was in one of the ruined and abandoned castles of the noisome and chitin-mantled Kar-chee.

But who the people were who had moved into it as a hermit-crab moves into an abandoned shell, he had yet to learn.

At any rate, they took a friendly enough interest in him as he hobbled slowly along. Someone offered him a fried egg; someone offered him a boiled potato. Someone offered him a finespun tunic that had seen better days. And someone offered to apply another dressing of salve to his saddle-sores, and to bandage them as well. He accepted all these offers.

After thanking the last donor, and finding that he could now walk much more comfortably, he said, “I am not complaining… but how is it that I’m not tied anymore?”

The bandager, a middle-aged man with a broken nose, said, matter-of-factly, “Why, because you couldn’t get out of here until we were ready to let you. Other than that, it’s Liberty Hall.” He chuckled briefly.

Jon-Joras said, “But I must get out of here. I have duties… outside.”

The bandager gave a grim little nod. “We all have duties… outside. For the time being, though, some of us have our duties… inside… as well.”

“Forgive me. But — you don’t talk like a Gentleman or like a Doghunter. I’m an outworlder, and easily confused.”

“I’ll tell you. At one time I lived in the State. The town or city, I mean. Drogue. Never been there? Not much of anything. I liked it, though. I was a shopkeeper. Had a little house on the outskirts. A garden plot.” His sentences got shorter and his face grew redder. “My land bordered a Gentleman’s, you see. Oegorix. Rot his blood… One day I came home. Tired. Sit in my garden. I thought.

“Garden? You see one here? That’s what I saw there. His High—”—the word he uttered was not “Nascence”—“had decided to extend his training grounds. So, rather than take a chunk out of his own grass or garden, he merely appropriated mine. Not a flower, not a plant did he leave me. His bloody musics were tramping up and down and under my window where the rosebeds had been.”

In the fight that followed, the shopkeeper had gotten his broken nose. He went from his house to find his shop wrecked, returned from his shop and saw the smoke of his burnt house. “So I went to Hathis. But things no better there I found. The Gentlemen do as they like in every place. Except here. Here, we do as we like. But we don’t like it here, much. And sooner or later…”

His mouth twitched. Then he said, in a smothered voice, “You’ll see. Go on, now.”

In some ways it was as if a highly eccentric Gentleman had moved his estate, herds, followers chick-boys and all, into the black basalt ruin of the inhuman and forest-laired Kar-chee castle — and then mixed it all up, humble-tumble. Here a woman hung a cloth bag full of soft cheese to drip, there a fletcher picked through a pile of feather in his aproned lap. A young boy practiced scales on an old horn. A woman on a stool stitched colored cloths into banner wefts, from time to time giving her rather dirty baby’s cradle a rock with her bare (and dirtier) foot.

But nowhere, anywhere, was there a hall windowed with oiled and painted paper, bright with flowers and gay with birdsong and the sound of water, where a dark woman in embroidered robes sat making crystal music.

A vision of the shattered face of the boy with chestnut hair rose before Jon-Joras’s inner eyes. What connection there might be between that bloody death and this curious wild encampment, he did not know; only that he felt a stirring conviction within him that such a connection there was. And then, through the contented confusion of the courtyard, a man with a scarred face picked his way.

He did not see, or seem to see, the prisoner at large — or for that matter, anyone else — but everyone saw him and marked his passage. The man was tall, with little deep-set eyes under black brows like nests of snakes. The bones of his face seemed about to burst through the reddened skin, the mouth was an all but lipless slash between the grim nose and the almost impossibly long and heavy chin. The scar went from scalp to neck, interrupted only by the stump of one ear. His feet tramped the black slabs as if all his enemies lay upon them.

Almost automatically, Jon-Joras stopped still and drew in upon himself until the man passed; entirely automatically, he fell in behind — well behind — him. Only as he followed after the unnaturally stiff figure, hands clenched at sides, did the formed thought reveal itself to his upper mind: where this man was, the answer was.

And so, passing through the wake of whatever emotion lies between fear and awe, Jon-Joras followed on as if drawn by rope and held by magnet.

Perhaps it was only a dream dragon that he had heard in his sleep that night. But the one he heard now was no dream — unless this whole scene, Kar-chee castle and court and all, unless it was a dream, too. His ear-drums vibrated with the hiss that became a scream. But—perhaps it was a dream! — no one else so much as looked up. And still the man walked on and on.

He stopped only at a low wall and there he leaned over. Jon-Joras walked on a bit, then put his hands on the parapet and peered. The thick, dark odor of dragon caught him sharply between nose and throat, but he didn’t turn away. Below him in an area partly ringed with seats, a dragon came rushing down the ground. His hide was thick with arrows and the stumps of arrows, and a smell Jon-Joras knew from other places, other times, came from the beast — the fishy stench of old, of rotten blood.

At first glance the scene below appeared to be a normal dragon hunt. Almost at once, though, Jon-Joras saw the differences. It was like seeing double. There, for instance, was the row of archers. But behind them was another row. The arms and hands and bows of the archers moved. The row behind them, clad in the same leaf-green, moved not. And in front of the row of archers was a trench.

The dragon came beating down the ground. Another flight of arrows bored into his hide. He neither plucked at them nor slackened pace. The thought came into Jon-Joras’s mind, this one is no virgin! At his near approach, the front row of bowmen seemed to vanish into the earth — one jump — the narrow trench, too narrow for a dragon-paw, received them. The row of dummies swayed slightly on the shaking ground. But the dragon ignored them. Unwavering, it rushed on and on.

From behind a low earthen wall directly in his path, up leaped a row of figures, bright banners waving on long poles. Jon-Joras had to squint and peer a moment before realizing that these, too, were dummies. The dragon plunged on through their midst. Jon-Joras flung his head around and his eyes flew down the arena to see what lay dead ahead of the plunging questing beast. He had not far to look.

There were the figures in huntsmen’s clothes, guns in hands. Bellowing his hatred, pain and rage, the dragon came on and on and in great, maddened leaps, flung himself upon the group. Jon-Joras had not seen this one trench. He blinked as the figures vanished into it. All but one of the figures vanished into it — that one, a dummy fastened to a stake, flew first right, then left, then was lifted high into the air to be worried as a rat in the jaws of a dog.

Something splashed and spattered on Jon-Joras’s face and chest. Thoughtlessly, he raised his hand, wiped at it. It was warm. It was blood. He looked, incredulous, at the figure which the dragon now held in its paws and tore into bits. And then he vomited again.

“That, you see,” the tall man with the scar said, abruptly turning to him “is what happens to traitors!”

His voice had started out astonishingly soft and smooth, the face as blank as ever; but on the last word the face convulsed, the voice rose into a shriek, cracked upon the last note. The hands leapt up from his sides. Jon-Joras fell back. Then the face struggled, the mask fell into place again. So did the hands.

The voice was soft again. “You outworlder — you’re a boy. A pawn, a slavey. You don’t know, does you? What’s been going on here on our old Earth? Think about the worst enemy they’s ever had in your world. Times it twice, add to it. And think what rotten things turns traitor, turns enemy. Is that—down there — too bad for it? Oh, no, boy. No… Too, good.” The voice fell lower on the last word, and the effect was somehow more frightening than when it rose. The tiny eyes glinted. The thin mouthed stretched.

Abruptly, he beckoned, turned his back, started down a ramp. And again Jon-Joras followed. Dimly he wondered if the Prime World, supposedly so old and so tired, might not be too much for him. Its unexpected vigor, wasted as it was in strange ways, was all too different from the tight and organized hegemonies of MM beta—where even the unexpected was predictable.

They came at last to a scene untouched by the turmoil and disorder of the rest of the place: a chamber immaculately clean, furnished with a trestle bed, a table consisting of a wide plank set on two more trestles, and a doorless cabinet lined with shelves. There were no chairs.

“My name is Hue,” the tall man said. “Not Huedeskant and not Huelorix — just Hue. Never mind telling me yours, I know it since you come here. We been watching you. We watches everyone. First, naturally, I thought maybe you was a spy. Now I think you isn’t. Probably…” His sentence ended on a significant pause.

“Where was the dragon hunt yesterday? Near the Lie village?” He went to a map on the wall and marked it with a piece of charcoal. “Tell me about it. All about it.”

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.