Dragonslayer: A Novel (24 page)

For just a second the little tableau remained so, intact. And then the horror for which Galen had prepared himself came. The dragon squirted flame like a man spitting carefully at some target in the gutter, and the flame seemed magically to gather itself and fall upon Jacopus all at once. There was only what he absorbed, no more. And when he had absorbed it, he was no longer a human being; he was a charcoal crab scrabbling amidst the rocks, uttering sounds horribly amplified by the rock walls; he was a black pulp, crumbling and shivering; he was a cinder with twisted sticks protruding.

Somewhere, from the edge of the Blight, came the long, keening wail of a woman, a woman bereft of all illusion and all hope.

The dragon ignored Galen. Lizardlike now with its wrinkled wings clasped at the body, Vermithrax twisted and vanished into the tunnel. The tail tip went last; and for an obscenely long time it lay drooped over the edge of the incline, like a creature with a separate life.

Only then did Galen mount his horse. Stupefied he gave it its head, and the grateful animal hurried back toward the greensward at a brisk trot. The knot of villagers was still there, stunned by what they had seen, this final horror in a day of horrors, and the horse was almost upon them before they parted to let it through.

Half a league down the road, the horse broke into a canter, smelling the river grass and sensing solace. And so Galen soon came back to Swanscombe. The blazes had diminished. He found both Simon and Valerian, grimy with sweat and smoke, inspecting the damage to their house. Miraculously, they had returned in time to put out the smoldering fire that threatened Simonburgh.

They straightened as they saw Galen approaching and, when he had dismounted, they looked at each other for several minutes wordlessly, the fire-blackened father and daughter and the boy who seemed to Valerian to have grown up overnight. Then Galen shook his head and gestured futilely to the ravaged village. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's my fault. I'm no sorcerer."

Simon stepped forward, and supported Galen with a strong arm around his shoulders. "Never mind," Simon said. "We can rebuild."

Valerian nodded. "They will rebuild," she said.

"I did all this!"

She shrugged. "We believed, too," she said. "We wanted you to try."

"Come," Simon drew him into the house. "We'll have soup. And there's meat. Later, we'll talk. Later we'll decide what's best to do."

And so they ate. They ate as the odors of the burning faded and a cool, full moon rose on the horizon. Galen had taken only a mouthful, however, before he began to fall asleep. He was still trembling from the horrors that he had witnessed that day, even as exhaustion claimed him, and he was clearly, both Simon and Valerian could see, not the cocky young magician who had come to Urland three months before. Guilt had replaced that confidence. Still, even as he stood up from the table to go to bed, reeling with fatigue, he said: "I shall need a weapon. Tomorrow." He was barely audible, but Simon heard him. Through the layers of his own exhaustion Simon looked keenly at this young man. He recognized that the Galen who spoke was deep inside.

"He said that he would need a lance," Simon said when Galen had gone.

"A weapon, yes," Valerian replied.

They sat quietly in the deepening dusk. The thought of lighting either lamp or fire was anathema to both. From outside came repeated calls, moans, bereft sobbing, gruff cursing. People were mourning. People were finding the new limits of their lives and building new defenses against a grotesque and encroaching fate.

"I want to tell you something," Simon said. Valerian could no longer see his face in the dusk. His head was bowed and he was inspecting his hands in the way of reminiscing old men. "When I was very young, oh ten, or maybe eleven, my father sent me away from home to apprentice. He wanted me to have a trade, you see, and not be a simple crofter like himself. He asked me what I wanted to be. I said that if I must be a craftsman, then let me be a smith. Like all children I was fascinated by the forge. I had watched for hours, watched the sparks, the red iron glowing, the crude metal changing into something else." Simon laughed. "The smith, he was a magician, you see. Well, my father made inquiries. He found the best smith in the land. He lived five days' journey to the north, beyond the northern villages. His name was Weland. I went, I stayed six years. By day I learned to be a blacksmith. I learned the qualities of metals, I learned to blend them, shape them. The old man talked little, but taught me everything. He showed me. At night, after the evening meal, he taught me the precious metals. I loved this best of all. Many, many nights, after I had learned to make my own buckle or brooch without his assistance, I would be startled by a hand on my shoulder. The old man was coming to get me, to send me to bed. I would have been working hours without noticing. I loved the gold and the silver. I loved the softness of it. I loved the way it could be curved in endless designs, like snakes. You know. I've shown you."

"Yes," Valerian said, touching the elaborate torque that lay, a talisman, around her neck.

"Then later I began to learn the weapons. First, the crude weapons—the pikes and halberds. Then the spearheads, the dart-heads, the arrowheads. All the old Celtic lore, and Roman knowledge, too. Then finally the daggers and the swords, the seax and the scramasax, from which our race takes its name. Finally, for two years I did nothing else, I crafted swords. I named them, and traded them to warriors I saw once only. They began to come for my swords. I would waken, and there would be a large man, sometimes wounded, beside the hearth. I would open the chest in which I kept my weapons. He would choose one, pay me with never a question, and go away. I never saw these same men again. They had no further need to come. My swords did not break, no matter how violent the clash, and those who bore them bore them until they died. Even now it happens that sometimes a young man will ride through Swanscombe with a fine sword at his hip, one of my swords, and he will tell me that he inherited it from his father, or his grandfather."

Simon fell silent for so long that Valerian thought that perhaps the story had ended, or that fatigue had rolled across her father's thoughts like fog across the moors, obscuring what he had wanted to tell. Outside, the sounds had diminished and the hurt village was subsiding into a fitful sleep, its silence broken only by occasional cries and by the rustling of the last of the fires. Somewhere nearby, at lengthening intervals, a mother wept brokenly for her dead child.

"Only dragons," Simon said. "Only dragons broke my blades. I never saw it, but I heard. Sometimes boys in shining armor would come to me. Just boys, smiling. 'A sword!' they would say. 'Your best. And a shield, your best limewood, iron-bossed.' Oh, nothing was too good for them! I could always tell. I would ask, 'A dragon?' And they would nod eagerly, so pathetically full of pride, and name this or that creature that had been rampaging. Their retainers, older men, would wait in the background. Sometimes there would be banners. A festival. They would choose a sword and go, and then a few days afterwards one or two of those retainers would ride up, all blackened and blear-eyed and cursing, to tell me that the sword had been faulty, that in the moment of combat it had broken, and their young hero had died most horribly. Usually they blamed me. Sometimes they rode a day out of their way to blame me. Sometimes they threatened, sought vengeance, got violent. I learned to warn the young men. I would tell them, 'This sword is not dragon-proof. Do not take it for that. It will not work. Dragons are different. They are not vulnerable in the way of other creatures.' But they never listened. They scoffed. They died.

"Weland, my teacher, had observed all this, had observed it often and said nothing. Then there came a time when I had been beaten near to death after such an episode. He splinted the broken leg, bandaged the slashes, nursed me. When I was well enough to hear him clearly he said, 'You are at a crossroads. Either you must abandon the craft for which I have trained you and about which I can teach you no more, or you must take it further than it has gone before. You must forge a weapon that will slay dragons.'

"I told him bitterly that it was impossible and that, if this was my only choice, then I must abandon the craft, but he shook his head and said, 'There is a way, but there is also a price.'"

Again Simon fell silent. He leaned forward breathing heavily, his great hands gripped together. "I was young," he said suddenly, vehemently. "I was proud, skilled, ambitious. Of course I wanted to do something, to acheive something that no one had ever done before. Oh yes, he told me! 'Remember,' he said, 'that
every gain is a loss!'
But what was I to make of that? How could I have taken that seriously, or even understood it? I brushed aside his warnings, pretending I had considered them, asked him to tell me how I could make a weapon which would slay even dragons. He shook his head. He said that the knowledge would not come from him, that he had shown me all he could, that I had mastered the craft. He told me that what I required was beyond craft. Then I had an inkling. I knew even before he told me that when I had recovered he would send me to a sorcerer, a worker in the Old Magic. He did. I traveled alone many days, following the instructions he had given me, and I came at last to Cragganmore."

Valerian sat bolt upright. "Then you knew. . ."

"Yes. I knew Ulrich thirty years ago. You remember that it was I who sent you to him."

"But I thought you had only heard of him."

Simon shook his head. "I hoped that he might come himself. ... I hoped even that he might use my weapon to battle Vermithrax."

"Your weapon! Then . . ."

"I made one, yes. Like Weland, Ulrich warned me. He listened to my request—oh, you see, I had a grand vision, that I could rid the world of the evil of dragons, once and for all—he listened and then he warned me. He said that it was the dream of all young men, to confront dragons and to defeat them, but that there came a point where compromises had to be made. Deals had to be made. Did I want something badly enough to give up something else?

"I told him I could not talk in generalities; that I needed to know
what
things. But he refused. He said that he did not know himself, but that the gods Grim and Weird, who ruled the fates of men, would reveal all things in time. But I must know, he said, that the power I sought had its price, and that if I chose to avail myself of it, then I would pay. Sooner or later I would pay. I. . . I agreed.

"He mixed for me, then, a potion. It took two nights and a day. I will not describe to you what went into it—some things I do not know myself—but it contained the very acids, fluids, and sinewy, tempering substances that, in the dragon's body, destroy a sword. Where these came from I did not ask, but I know they had been dearly bought. At certain times in its making, the potion seethed and shone with a green light.

"When it had cooled, he poured it into an earthen jar that had been lined with crushed meerschaum and semiprecious jewels. Nothing else, he said, would contain it. Then he gave it to me, with instructions for its use. When I mentioned payment he looked at me pityingly. 'But did you not understand?' he asked. 'You
shall
pay, and so you
have paid
already. The pact is sealed. Go, and make good use of it!'

"So I traveled home. I smelted the best iron, iron almost without impurities, and in the last stage of the smelting, following Ulrich's instructions, I added the first half of the potion. Then I twisted the bars together and I beat them into not a sword but a lance. A lance of my own design. I did my best. All my years went into it. And what was strange . . ." Simon faltered.

"Go on," Valerian said. "Strange?"

"There . . . there were no sparks! There was nothing wasted. It was as if, as I shaped it, the material itself—I can't explain it—as if it
sought
to be shaped. And the color! It was like nothing I have seen. At its hottest, when most metal would have glowed white, this was green! An incredible green! Once, when I was a child, a traveler came. He was selling oddities and curios. He had a leathery thing, a pouch that he said was the skin of an unborn drag-onet. When he held it against the light it shone green. It was the color of the lance as I tempered it."

"And so where is it?" Valerian asked. "What became of it?"

But her father continued as if he had not heard. "I chose a Roman name for it. Why? I am not sure, except that I saw a brave man slain once, a lone Roman and the last of his legion. He stood bleeding in the ruins of his hill fort, screaming at our horses, and his sword as he swung it whistled above the din. Perhaps I paid him a tribute. I called it
Sicarius Dracorum,
Dragonslayer. And I crafted a sheath for it, the finest tough boar hide, sinew-sewn, and I tooled it in long evenings and inlaid it with traces of silver and gold. Then I fashioned a box of the finest oak, a box with a secret lock, and I oiled and polished it until it shone. In it I laid the weapon."

"And then?"

"Then I waited. I waited. My reputation as an armorer had not diminished at all. Fighting men still came, Briton and Saxon, for my swords. But they were a mercenary lot, rich enough, able to pay, but interested only in rapine and plunder. From the day I made that lance to this, no brave young warrior has come to claim it. No earnest youngster with the gleam of selflessness in his eye."

"Until now. Galen."

"Yes," he said, nodding slowly. "Galen. I think so. In the morning we shall know."