Dragonslayer: A Novel (14 page)

They dug a grave for Hodge on the slope of the grassy knoll above the camp, and wrapped him well in his old sheepskin robe. One eye they could not close; it remained fixed in death, staring, it seemed to Galen, directly at him wherever he moved and causing Hodge's last words to keep running through his mind:
Remember, the lake of fire . .
. Valerian drew a corner of the robe across his face, and the Urlanders lowered the body of the old man into the earth and covered it. Gringe watched silently from a dead elm on the hillside and he remained unmoving there after the little procession had taken to the road. Xenophobius the muleteer left last, casting dark glances at Galen's back, and muttering about strangers and ill luck. Long after the rumps of the mules had vanished, Gringe rose from his tree and, circling once over the new grave, glided toward the dark mountains which were the great barrier between Urland and the rest of the world.

Valerian and Galen had been walking some distance ahead of the others.

"Well," Valerian was saying as the raven caught up and passed over them, "looks as if you don't have anyone now."

Galen nodded. "I have a mother and father. At least, I think so. I haven't seen them for years. The fact is that I guess I was a nuisance to them and they sort of . . . well,
sold
me to Ulrich when I was just a kid. I don't remember them too well. They went away somewhere."

"Sold
you! What did you do?"

Galen flushed and shrugged. "I don't know. It was a long time ago. They just wanted to get rid of me, you know. They always wanted to travel." He shrugged again, anxious to get this conversation away from himself. "How about you? Any folks?"

"Just a father. My mother died soon after I was born."

"Too bad. What's your father do?"

"He's a blacksmith. And a silversmith too. The best. See?" She opened her shirt at the throat to reveal the cunning band that Galen had glimpsed in the forest pool. Looking at it closely now, he gasped at its beauty. It was elaborately fashioned of several twisted cords of silver, each made of interwoven smaller strands, and fastened at the ends by small, silver reptilian heads, which strained toward each other at Valerian's throat but which remained separated by the width of a finger. "It's called a torque. My father says that neckpieces like this were worn by the warriors of the Old People, who were here long, long before even the Romans, and that sometimes they would go into battle wearing nothing else." She paused, and smiled. "My father solved the mystery of how to fasten them around the neck. He wouldn't let me watch while he placed this on me. He said that it will bring me luck. He said that if nothing else it would make stronger my disguise, because no woman was ever allowed to wear a torque. But he made
this
for me, too." She held out her right hand. Circling the little finger was an exquisite silver ring, a tiny, perfect copy of the torque. So fine were the strands of silver, and so intricately were they interwoven, that Galen could hardly trace their convolutions. He could not imagine how the blunt fingers of a blacksmith could have fashioned something so delicate. "And he made one exactly the same for my best friend, Melissa." Valerian laughed and shook her head. "You know, I think when he did that he had pretended for so long that he actually thought of me as a boy. He actually believed that I might marry Melissa, and he saw the rings as a kind of ... a kind of betrothal."

"Does she wear her ring, too?"

"Always. Even after . . . well, never mind."

They walked for a while in silence. Gringe glided ahead through the forest, flitting from tree to tree like errant snow from the looming mountains ahead.

"Is that where your name comes from, too?"

"From the Old People?" She laughed. "No, Valerian is a wine. A Roman wine."

"What's wine?"

Again she laughed. "A drink. Like mead, only it's made from grapes."

Galen shrugged. He had never drunk mead, and he didn't have the slightest idea what grapes were.

"Well, anyway," Valerian went on, "the Romans loved wine, and they brought a lot of it here and stored it. I guess it gets better the older it is. They stored a lot of it in big jugs in caves where it was cool and dark. Some of them must have left in a hurry when the Saxons came, because the day I was born my father and some other men were in the hills, looking for lqst sheep, and they came to the old Roman fortress behind Swanscombe. The oldest man with them could remember his grandfather telling how he had fought a battle there with Romans and Britons. Anyway, they went even farther—they could hear the sheep in the hills—and they came to a cave where the Romans had stored wine. Father said there were one hundred big jugs, and he said the wine was delicious. It had just gotten better and better all those years. They took some back to the village then and more later, and before two years had passed they had drunk it all at feasts. But when he came back the first time, after discovering the wine, I had been born, and he and my mother drank my health in old, old Roman wine. He said it was the happiest day of his life."

They walked a long time in silence. Galen mused over the story the girl had just told him, and the insight it gave into the life of a family. Never, in all his life, had anyone wanted him just for himself. What he had been had apparently been so annoying to his parents that they had got rid of him as soon as possible, and Ulrich had always wanted to mold him into a sorcerer. "What's it like?" he asked.

"What? What's
what
like?"

"To have someone—your father—who wants to keep you just for what you are?"

"I don't know. I've never known anything else. I thought you were asking what it's like to pretend for all these years. That's awful. Terrifying."

"Terrifying?"

She nodded. "Because if you pretend to be something long enough, you actually become that thing. After a while it's no longer an act. You're
it!
And the fact is that I don't
want
to forget I'm a ... a woman."

"So, what are you going to do when you get home?"

"I don't know yet, but I think probably I'll tell what I am— before the next Lottery—and make some sort of recompense." They trod several minutes in silence. The great mountains, closer now, loomed over them. "I wonder," she said, "if guilt and pretending always go together. Do you think they do?"

CHAPTER SEVEN

Swanscombe

Sated, Vermithrax lay
inert. The sun gleamed on its length, steaming away the last vestiges of earthy damp and warming the bare and shredded places where torn scales had not regenerated. The sun felt wonderful, and Vermithrax released a lazy, fiery exhalation of contentment, which snaked thirty feet among broken stones and briefly ignited nondescript bits of matter. On the hillside at the edge of the Blight, the two parties of spectators-villagers and courtiers—had begun to leave silently. Vermithrax watched with a baleful eye until the last figure had vanished, making sure that no hero, glinting like ice in his armor, was going to come forward and, posturing ridiculously, offer battle. It had happened two or three times, many years before, that the basking and replete Vermithrax had had to rouse itself to deal with that sort of presumption, and had then gone on to vent its wrath on the countryside at large, incinerating villages, crofts, and forests indiscriminately. Now, however, it seemed that there was no longer need for that sort of nonsense; there were no more heroes.

When the ridge was clear of humans, Vermithrax allowed its eyes to close contentedly, and for a little while it dozed. It was quite alone. Nothing approached it save a few witless insects, drawn by the scent of scraps, and a single dragonfly which rested for a time on a nearby rock, contemplating the monster. The sun rose higher, got hotter, and the insect noises in the Blight grew more insistent.

Half a mile above, a gyrfalcon turned in lazy circles, also contemplating the dragon. It had witnessed the entire sacrificial scene —the arrival of the festive procession, the immolation of the horse, and the martyrdom of Melissa, and its rhythmic circlings had not changed. All of this bestial human activity was of little concern to the falcon, certainly of less concern than the cautious emergence of an otter's snout from its hole in a muddy bank of the Swanscombe River. The falcon circled and waited.

From that height it could see the entire southern end of Urland. Swanscombe village lay directly beneath. Immediately to the north was the Blight, its blackness relieved only by the shimmering paTe green shape of the reposing Vermithrax, and farther to the northwest, hazy in the distance, stood the col of Morgenthorme, the fastness of Casiodorus, to which the royal procession was even now returning. Far to the north—the gyrfalcon knew this, for it had reconnoitered the previous day, although it could not now see them—were the northern Urland villages of Turnratchit, Very-mere, and Nudd, each tucked into its surrounding hills. To the west, flowing northwestward to the distant sea, was the shallow Varn, the river that marked the western boundary of Urland, and to the east, beyond the dark lake that was part of the broad south-flowing River Ur, lay the mountains over which the falcon had passed the day before, after its release by Galen. On all its horizons, Urland faded gently through green hills and fields into mists so soft that it was impossible for even the falcon to tell where the land ended and the sky began. Ever since leaving Cragganmore the falcon had traveled westward, and it intended to continue in that direction the next day, or the next. For the moment it was concentrating completely on the cautiously emerging otter; yet there was something else, something undefinable, that urged it to stay in Urland, to stay for at least the summer.

The otter's head and shoulders were now exposed.

Twenty leagues to the east, Galen, Valerian, and the others were nearing the end of the last pass through the mountains. They had traveled swiftly since that morning, for they were very cold. In fact, several of the Urlanders wore their sleeping robes draped around their shoulders for extra warmth, so that they looked like shaggy, bulbous beasts. From the top of the pass, before clouds hid the sun, they were given a westward view of Urland which was almost the same as the falcon's, except that the Lake of Passages lay a mile ahead at their feet, and the beautiful green and undulating landscape that was Urland was laced with long shadows of the gathering clouds. Valerian strained to see the Blight, to point it out to Galen, but she was unable to do so, for it was indistinguishable from the shadows of the great clouds. They stopped only briefly; then, led by Xenophobius the muleteer, the most anxious of all to set foot once again on his native land, they began to descend the serpentine stretch of path toward the Lake of Passages.

The cool shadows of the clouds touched Vermithrax. The dragon groaned—a hollow reverberating sound among the boulders —and awakened. The dogged pain had returned with the vanishing of the sun, and with it a vague unease that the dragon could not at first identify. Yet it was familiar, a premonition, a foreboding. Scarcely moving its head, Vermithrax glanced around. No, there was no immediate threat, but threat there indeed was, approaching. Threat and fate. A deep part of the dragon, far beneath memories and decrepitude, exulted. Something beyond all ordinary senses, a sense of perfect, circular time, caused Vermithrax to stir, to raise its head, and to summon its dignity. It knew that it was being watched, that there must be no hint of weakness or decay. It began to move, wings spread and neck magnificently arched, back up the slope toward the opening of its lair. When it reached the ledge in front of the cave, it turned and looked once more out over the brooding valley of the Blight, and to the ridge of hills beyond. Then, because it knew instinctively that when the challenge came it would come from the east, it looked to the mountains far across the Lake of Passages. But nothing moved in the milky distance; no unfamiliar scent drifted on the breeze. As the first of the rain began, Vermithrax entered the cave and began to wind its way through tortuous passageways down to the lake where fire played, and where the three dragonets hissed and postured and tested their prowess against each other. Vermithrax found its way to the ledge above the lake and settled there, simultaneously soothed and troubled by the shapes moving in the dark waters.

Far above, the falcon had hung patiently in the turbulences and crosswinds that heralded the coming storm. It now decided its moment had come. The otter had just emerged from its earth and was gliding warily toward the river. With a graceful movement, the falcon tipped forward and folded its wings. Down it hurtled, implacable, guiding its plunge with infinitesimal adjustments of its tail. Its talons entered the otter's heart just as the first rain struck. Another instant and it was airborne again with its dangling prey and, when the thunderbolts rolled across the Blight, it was feeding comfortably among the crags, protected by a beetling overhang like its own dark brow.

Galen and the returning Urlanders were in the middle of the Lake of Passages when the storm began. They had hoped to get across ahead of it and so had hurried the launching and rigging of their boat and the unfurling of its linen lateen sail; but they were only partway over when the aroused lake began to roll, and the shifting winds, glancing off the mountains behind and the cliffs at the north end of the lake, swung the fragile sail wildly. With considerable difficulty in the lashing rain, they managed to lower the sail and gather it inboard. Then they took to the oars, holding the cumbersome vessel steady while the storm raged and the reeling mules brayed out their fear. Violent, the storm was also short, and soon the wind abated and the rain thinned. Through the shifting curtains, Galen glimpsed the far shore; stroking in time to Mal-kin's commands, the oarsmen soon brought them to it. Xenophobius was the first out and he immediately fell to his knees and kissed a large rock. "Urland."