The Eyes of the Dragon

4

Although Roland grew to love his wife, he never grew to love that activity which most men consider sweet, the act which produces both the lowliest cook’s 'prentice and the heir to the highest throne. He and Sasha slept in separate bed-rooms, and he did not visit her often. These visits would happen no more than five or six times in a year, and on some of those occasions no iron could be made at the forge, in spite of Flagg’s ever more potent drinks and Sasha’s unfailing sweetness.

But, four years after the marriage, Peter was made in her bed. And on that one night, Roland had no need of Flagg’s drink, which was green and foaming and which always made him feel a little strange in his head, as if he had gone crazy. He had been hunting that day in the Preserves with twelve of his men. Hunt-ing was the thing that Roland had always loved most of all -the smell of the forest, the crisp tang of the air, the sound of the horn, and the feel of the bow as an arrow left on a true, hard course. Gunpowder was known but rare in Delain, and to hunt game with an iron tube was considered low and contemptible in any case.

Sasha was reading in bed when he came to her, his ruddy, bearded face alight, but she laid her book on her bosom and listened raptly to his story as he told it, his hands moving. Near the end, he drew back to show her how he had drawn back the bow and had let Foe-Hammer, his father’s great arrow, fly across the little glen. When he did this, she laughed and clapped and won his heart.

The King’s Preserves had almost been hunted out. In these modern days it was rare to find so much as a good-sized deer in them, and no one had seen a dragon since time out of mind. Most men would have laughed if you had suggested there might still be such a mythy creature left in that tame forest. But an hour before sundown on that day, as Roland and his party were about to turn back, that was just what they found… or what found them.

The dragon came crashing and blundering out of the under-brush, its scales glowing a greenish copper color, its soot-caked nostrils venting smoke. It had not been a small dragon, either, but a male just before its first molting. Most of the party were thunderstruck, unable to draw an arrow or even to move.

It stared at the hunting party, its normally green eyes went yellow, and it fluttered its wings. There was no danger that it could fly away from them-its wings would not be well developed enough to support it in the air for at least another fifty years and two more moltings-but the baby-webbing which holds the wings against a dragon’s body until its tenth or twelfth year had fallen away, and a single flutter stirred enough wind to topple the head huntsman backward out of his saddle, his horn flying from his hand.

Roland was the only one not stunned to utter movelessness, and although he was too modest to say so to Sasha, there was real heroism in his next few actions, as well as a sportsman’s zest for the kill. The dragon might well have roasted most of the surprised party alive, if not for Roland’s prompt action. He gigged his horse forward five steps, and nocked his great arrow. He drew and fired. The arrow went straight to the mark-that one gill-like soft spot under the dragon’s throat, where it takes in air to create fire. The worm fell dead with a final fiery gust, which set all the bushes around it alight. The squires put this out quickly, some with water, some with beer, and not a few with piss and, now that I think of it, most of the piss was really beer, because when Roland went a-hunting, he took a great lot of beer with him, and he was not stingy with it, either.

The fire was out in five minutes, the dragon gutted in fifteen. You still could have boiled a kettle over its steaming nostrils when its tripes were let out upon the ground. The dripping nine-chambered heart was carried to Roland with great ceremony. He ate it raw, as was the custom, and found it delicious. He only regretted the sad knowledge that he would almost certainly never have another.

Perhaps it was the dragon’s heart that made him so strong that night. Perhaps it was only his joy in the hunt, and in knowing he had acted quickly and coolheadedly when all the others were sitting stunned in their saddles (except, of course, for the head huntsman, who had been lying stunned on his back). For whatever reason, when Sasha clapped her hands and cried, “Well done, my brave Husband!,” he fairly leaped into her bed. Sasha greeted him with open eyes and a smile that reflected his own triumph. That night was the first and only time Roland enjoyed his wife’s embrace in sobriety. Nine months later-one month for each chamber of the dragon’s heart-Peter was born in that same bed, and the Kingdom rejoiced-there was an heir to the throne.