The Book of Earth (19 page)

Erde’s composure nearly deserted her. A dragon-hunter! She had heard of such men, and this one had caught her unawares as he must have hoped he would, for sure enough, he was studying her much too carefully. For the dragon’s sake, she must appear unconcerned.

“Are you interested in dragons, milady?”

Erde shrugged, but it was more a convulsive twitch, and Red-jerkin read her nervousness clearly. But he surprised her again. He leaned forward over the dying fire with a barely restrained eagerness totally at odds with his hardbitten manner. “Oh, lady,” he murmured. “Please tell me you have the knowledge that I seek.”

Erde snatched at impassivity and held it tight.

“Ah, well,” he said, sitting back. “Such knowledge is not easily won. I of all men have learned this, a dubious privilege of advancing age. Pray permit me, milady, to continue my tale.”

Erde could not help it. She nodded graciously, as a baron’s daughter should.

Red-jerkin took a deep breath. “As the seasons passed, so did the times of plenty in our lands to the west. His Majesty’s vassal lords grew restless. Traveling as much as I was, either on the king’s business negotiating with some malignant baron or other, or when I could, following up some report of dragon-sign . . . I was unaware that the worsening condition of my estates exceeded anyone else’s. The whole kingdom was suffering, after all, but . . . oh, yes, my dear lady, I see that look.
Meriah’s
look. You might properly call my distraction negligence—I’ll bear that guilt fully. But I was also kept in ignorance by my two wastrel sons, who were covering up a profligacy of habit that had not been so evident while the harvests were rich but as soon as . . . well, I’m sure a daughter of Iron Joe can well imagine.”

Is my father profligate? Did he mean not all high lords considered feasting and velvet robes a critical expenditure? Erde considered the new and revealing notion that her own instinctive scruples might have been more proper in this matter.

Noting her pensiveness, Red-jerkin nodded. “Indeed,
your grandmother and I share the misfortune of our sons. Perhaps it is the price of being dedicated to something other than heir-raising. Perhaps if we’d had them together, as I intended . . . well, I suppose that might have been even worse, though I can’t conceive of how. But I’m wandering, aren’t I? Bear with me, milady. Another privilege of age.”

Erde was surprised he spoke so self-consciously of his age. Her impression of him was one of strength and great vitality.

“So one gray fall day, a wandering friar begged the hospitality of the household, and managed to find excuses to keep himself there all winter. Meanwhile, the king’s relations with his barons were disintegrating, as you recall . . . no, perhaps you were too young to be aware of such matters lo these two long winters ago, but I assure you I was extremely busy trying to maintain the King’s Peace . . . a futile effort, as it turned out, in that winter of the silent revolt. But once or twice between my frantic comings and goings, I met this so-called priest who’d taken up residence in my home, then the deep snows isolated me at court until the spring. He seemed an inoffensive sort, this cleric, if rather given to hysterical prophecies and an obsession with the supposedly divine dominion of men over women and the natural world.”

Their eyes met over the fire, and Red-jerkin smiled sourly. “Ah, yes, you are Meriah’s get, bless you indeed . . . you’re at the mark before I’ve even loosed my arrow.” He leaned forward so that the flames lit his face eerily. “It was Fra Guill who sent you running from Tor Alte, wasn’t it? He turned your father against you somehow.”

Erde nodded, transfixed.

“Nay, don’t look so amazed. I’m no mind-seer. Any man who’s dealt with that hell-fiend of a priest and not been cozened by him would see the truth of it. But not the baron your father, I take it?”

Erde shivered, hung her head.

“And not my sons,” he admitted softly. “The priest’s lust for power gives him a damnable nose for weakness. He ferrets it out like a truffle hound and moves right in to woo and devour.” He stirred up the fire, tossed on a few twigs, then neatly sectioned the remaining bird and passed half
over the flames to Erde. She took it gratefully and without pretense. This was her first hot meal in nearly two weeks. Red-jerkin—or Sir Hal, as she was finding enough sympathy to think of him—ate for a while with deep concentration, allowing her to do likewise. They passed a companionable silence together, cleaning every morsel from the scrawny bird bones. Finally the knight unslung a leather wineskin and raised it to his lips, then lowered it just before drinking and held it out across the fire.

“Your pardon, milady, for my lapse of manners. I’ve gotten so used to solitude, I quite forgot I had company.” He jerked his head at the mule, who appeared to have dozed off standing by the fire. “He doesn’t drink.”

Erde wished she was not so easily charmed by his courtier’s ease, however out of practice he might claim to be, but the familiarity of it was reassuring, and his dry humor a relief after the rough conditions she’d been enduring. She took the wineskin and sipped from it delicately. She could not help the face she made.

Hal laughed. “Awful, isn’t it?”

His laugh was generous and open. Erde smiled with him just a little as she passed the offending wine back to him. He took quite a long drink of it for a man who’d just complained of its quality, then dug a rag out of his jerkin to carefully wipe his beard and hands, folded the rag, and put it away.

“But what did you do to become the unwelcome focus of his deranged and self-serving visions?” Hal peered hard at her, then waved a hand. “No matter. We’ll get to that later.” But he continued a little reluctantly, “So, as you have already guessed, milady, with a wisdom far advanced of your youth, after that winter’s undeclared rebellion of the vassal-lords against their king, I returned home at first thaw to find that in the same way that His Majesty had become king in name only, I was no longer master of my own lands. My sons had become willing puppets of the hell-priest, who had used the long winter to good effect, spreading his lies and paranoia throughout the domain, turning family, friends, and sworn vassals against me on the grounds of my ‘unholy practices.’ My fault, my fault, all of it, the cause of the bad weather and failing harvests. My
practices
, if allowed to persist, would soon bring the final
wrath of God down upon them all. And as the tide turned against the king, my neighbors were none too eager to stand up for an avowed royalist.”

Erde could not mask her surprise.

“Ah, milady, when I say a
silent
revolt, I do mean that loyal subjects of the king such as your grandmother would not have been included in the secret barons’ cabal, or even kept informed. But you can be sure this was one song Fra Guill sang to your father in his siren’s voice!”

Hal paused, blew some of his anger away in a long exhalation. “Another task that devil’s spawn had dedicated the winter to was gathering around him an elite band of ‘followers,’ fellow fanatics who were coincidentally well-versed in the martial arts.” He sighed, then inclined his head in pained resignation. “You see how, even before he had need of protection from the world, he planned for it and carried it out so smoothly that I’d wager even the brothers themselves aren’t aware they were recruited to serve as Fra Guill’s personal bodyguard.”

Hal looked up from his study of the coals. The rage and loss in his eyes were as fresh as an open wound. “Milady, he drove me from my lands by force, he and his white-robed henchmen. Friends turned me away from their gates with arrows and exorcisms. Word spread to the court, and I could not turn to the king without disgracing him, thereby eroding what little power he had left. The final blow was a rumor, the priest’s own invention I’ve no doubt, that the King’s Knights were plotting a coup of their own. All seven of us.” His mouth twisted but his rage had run its course. He sighed and spread his hands. “Coup de grace. So here I am. Wanderer. Knight-errant, if you will. Not exactly a public enemy, but certainly suspect to any revolting baron. The perfect candidate, if I may modestly point out, to take up the task of protecting the Lady Erde von Alte, so recently gone errant herself in the eyes of the law, her father, and the hell-spawned Fra Guill.” Hal raised his eyebrows and gazed at her down the length of his nose. “That is, if milady will have me. . . .”

Erde regarded him uneasily. Even if she could speak, she would not have known what to say to him. He knew who and what she was, and did not call her a witch. His tale, if all true—and he was a convincing teller—touched her heart
and made him her natural ally. If they joined forces, she could probably stop worrying about starving. But could she really trust him? What of the dragon? Did he mean it help or harm?

Hal could read her doubt. He shrugged, like the merchant who’s been told that the price is too high. “Let an old soldier convince you, lady, that he found you much too easily. You’ve been very very lucky so far. Luck such as yours cannot be expected to hold out. You need a little guidance.”

Erde returned his gaze steadily.

“Oh, my, but Meriah would be proud of you.” He grinned at her admiringly. “True, you’ve no reason to trust me or my story, and yes, you’ve guessed it. I have an ulterior motive that I see no point in concealing further. Perhaps you are wondering what particular practice the heathen brother found most unholy? Something so unthinkable that he could use it to turn my neighbors against me? Well, please believe it was not gluttony or drunkenness, though I have drunk too much in my time, Lord knows, and probably will again. Nor was it lechery, at which Fra Guill himself could beat any man’s record.” He paused abruptly, flicked a glance at her, and then looked away. “Your pardon, lady, if I touch on anything you may have painful firsthand knowledge of.”

Erde shook her head emphatically, frowning.

He let a breath out through his teeth. “Thank God for that. No, I’m sure none of us has heard the real story. But we’ll leave yours for another time, hah? The finale of mine, the grand debacle, is that what Fra Guill seized upon to turn my people against me was, of course, my dragon-study, which I had never been secret about and certainly could not deny. He twisted an honest scientific and scholarly inquiry into a pact with Satan himself.” He fixed her with an indignant glare. “Can you imagine? He accused me of attempting to raise dragons out of the Fiery Pit to lay waste to the countryside—further waste than I’d already caused, though why I would do this to my own lands he never did explain satisfactorily. I told anyone who’d listen, and there were damned few by that time, believe me, that despite my knowing as much as any man alive about dragons, I had
never yet laid eyes on one and was not even sure I believed in them anymore.”

Hal reached into his jerkin as he talked, digging out two small round objects that glinted in the firelight. He jiggled them pensively in his closed hand. “But I made the profound mistake of declaring to the brother one sunny and innocent day, out of the depths of my enthusiasm and before I was truly aware of his power and my peril, that there was very little in this world I would treasure more than to stand face-to-face with an actual dragon. With that casual remark, he ruined me.”

Now he fixed his bright gaze on Erde intently, his voice rough with passion. “Ruined or not, lady, the remark still holds true. Having little else to direct my life toward but survival, my dragon-quest continues. We live in dark times, perhaps the darkest, but you know, milady, dragonkind are the purest of God’s creations, the elemental embodiment of the life-force, of anything that has meaning. They could be our salvation. The hell-priest has vowed to destroy dragonkind. I cannot let that happen.”

Erde’s breath came a bit more easily. She could see he was a man obsessed. And that she had wrongly assumed that dragon-hunter meant dragon-slayer.

“I have become expert over the years at reading hidden signs.” Hal cleared his throat. “That is, at interpreting rumor, at hearing what they are really saying in the countryside and what they are not. I’ve followed many trails and most of them are cold long before I get there. One is not. The one that intersects with you.”

He gave her a moment to react. When she did not, he held up between thumb and forefinger the silver mark, or one like it, twisting it back and forth so that it flashed firelight into Erde’s eyes. “You know, there’re many won’t accept this as legal tender anymore.” Suddenly he flipped the coin at her. Once again she fumbled the catch.

Hal chortled, satisfied. “Young girls probably don’t throw things at each other as much as young boys. Well, so much for your disguise. I might not have given you a second thought, back there in the town. But then my curiosity was aroused . . . I heard there was a search on. So now, tell me, lady, what need you had for ten goats in the town
of Tubin when a mere week later I find you with only one?”

The mule, who had wakened from his nap to nose quietly for grass along the edge of the firelight, raised his head suddenly to stare off into the forest, his nostrils flaring.

“Next, the long-term evidence,” Hal continued. “The token of an ageless history I’ll wager you have no inkling of. Or do you?” He slipped the mark back into his belt and in its place, held up a ruddy cut-stone brooch. “How much did she tell you?”

Erde gasped voicelessly.

“Your pardon for my inexcusable liberties with your lug-gage, dearest lady. But you cannot know what this means to me. My whole life I have . . .” He leaned forward. “Lady, I beg you, tell me if you know. Are you the Dragon Guide? If you are, I lay my life and my sword at your feet forever.”

Erde felt Earth’s return well before the mule, who knew it sooner than Hal. He snorted, wickered a warning, and moved to stand protectively at the knight’s back.

Hal rose into a crouch, still watching Erde as if his salvation depended on it. “Who comes? Is it he?” Seeing joy and anxiety bloom simultaneously across her unguarded face, he shivered and slid to his knees. “Oh, lady, what will you tell him?”

Erde’s only hope, as the dragon’s great horned head loomed up out of the forest darkness behind them, was that Hal would not be too disappointed.