The Very Best of Tad Williams (3 page)

“No,” said Guldhogg a bit sourly. “No, Bliv, my dear old bodkin, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Simple enough, Guld, my reptilian chum. We can’t settle down because everywhere we go, I make a big show of driving you away or even killing you. That means you can’t very well hang around with me afterward. But if we can drive away this ogre together...well, we’ll be paid handsomely again, but this time you won’t have done any harm, so we’ll both be able to stay on in Fiskhaven. We can buy a castle and land, settle down, and enjoy the fruits of our partnership—” he gestured to the heavily laden wagon, “—in peace and quiet, and even more importantly in one place, as befits individuals of our mature and sensible years. No more tramping.”

“And what am I supposed to eat?” asked Guldhogg. “After all, it is devouring the local livestock that usually makes me dracona non grata in the first place.” The great worm suddenly grew fretful. “You don’t really think my presence is noxious, do you, Blivvy? I mean, we’ve known each other a while now. You can speak sooth.”

“You are lovely company,” the knight said firmly. “Only the shortsighted, the dragon-bigoted, or the just plain rude would suggest otherwise. But you didn’t let me finish describing my plan, which includes provision for your sustenance. We have money, Guldy. Once the ogre has been dispatched, we will settle in Fiskhaven and become farmers! We’ll buy sheep and raise them. You may eat as many as you need, as long as you leave the little ones to grow up into bigger ones—then there will always be more sheep to eat. That’s how farming works, you know.”

“Really? That’s marvelous!” Guldhogg shook his great scaly head. “What will they think of next?”

The battle with the terrible ogre Ljotunir raged for days, ending at last in the hills high above Fiskhaven, so that the whole of the vale rang with the sounds of combat. When it was over and Sir Blivet was about to go down to the town and collect his ogre-slaying money, he noticed that Guldhogg looked preoccupied, even sad.

“What’s wrong, dear old chum?”

“It’s the ogre. He’s so miserable!” Guldhogg nodded toward Ljotunir, who was sitting against the trunk of an oak tree, making loud snuffling sounds.

Blivet took off his heavy helmet and walked across the clearing to where Ljotunir sat—the tree was leaning alarmingly from the weight.

The monster’s cheeks were indeed wet with tears. “What ails you, good sir ogre?” Sir Blivet asked. “Are you regretting having settled for a one-quarter share? You understand that the risk of this business is ours, don’t you? And that we have built up our reputation over several years? But perhaps instead you are mourning your lost reputation as an unbeatable and fearsome giant?”

“It’s not that, and it’s not the money.” Ljotunir sniffed and wiped his face with a kerchief the size of a tablecloth. (In fact, it was a tablecloth.) “It’s...well, I don’t really have any place to go anymore. I agreed to this because I didn’t want to fight. Frankly, I haven’t been myself the last century—I have the cruelest sort of aches and pains in my joints from this seaside air, Sir Knight, and the noise of the wind keeps me from sleeping most nights—but I’m still very fond of the place. Where will I go now? How will I live?” Alarmingly, the giant burst into tears again, his sobs shaking a nest full of bewildered young squirrels out of the leaning oak and onto the ground.

“Here now,” Blivet soothed him. “Surely your share of the reward money will be more than enough to purchase you a lovely stone hut in the wilderness somewhere. Perhaps you should move farther north—I hear that the arctic air of the Orkneys is lovely and dry, which should be easier on your infirmity.”

“Dry, yes, but cold enough to freeze the berries off a basilisk!” said the ogre cheerlessly. “That would play hob with my joints, now wouldn’t it?” Again his chest heaved.

“Oh, look at the poor fellow!” Guldhogg said, coming up. “He’s so sad! His little face is all scrunched up! Isn’t there anything we can do?”

Blivet examined the sobbing giant, whose “little face” was the size of the knight’s war-shield. At last Blivet sighed, turned to the dragon, and said, “I may have a solution. But first I’ll need that cask of ale.”

“Really?” asked Guldhogg, who was interested to see what odd human thing Blivet would do next. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Drink it,” the knight said. “Most of it, anyway.”

Sir Blivet had just realized that if he wanted to make his friend Guldhogg happy, they were going to have to let the now-homeless ogre join them—which meant that, once again, they would be moving on in the morning.

It didn’t seem too bad at first. Ljotunir’s presence meant that Guldhogg could take the occasional week off from menacing townsfolk, leaving that strenuous chore to the Ljotunir, and that they could even go back to some localities they had already scourged of dragons (well, one dragon, anyway), but which would now need their help with ogre infestations. But Blivet himself was not getting any days off, and they were doing a great deal of tramping from county to county.

Guldhogg couldn’t help noticing that the knight drank a great deal of ale every night before falling asleep now, or that his conversation, quite expansive only a few weeks earlier, was now reduced mostly to, “Forsooth, whatever.”

And things were getting worse.

News of the confidence game that Blivet and Guldhogg were running in the middle of England had begun to spread around the island—not among the townsfolk who were its targets but within the nation’s large community of fabulous, mythical, and semi-imaginary animals. These creatures could not help noticing that two very large members of their kind, a dragon and an ogre, had found a way not only to survive, but also to thrive. As word of this breakthrough got around, Blivet and his friends soon found that everywhere they went they were getting business propositions from various haunts and horrors down on their luck or otherwise in need of a change.

“I know it will be a bit hard on us, Blivet old friend,” said Guldhogg. “But I can’t help it—I know how these creatures feel. It’s been a long, bad time for mythical monsters, and it’s only going to get worse when the Renaissance shows up in a few hundred years.”

“But we can’t use all of them,” Blivet protested. “What right-thinking town council is going to hire a knight to slay a couple of cobbler’s elves?”

“We can find work for them. Say, look at your boots, Blivvy. Wouldn’t you like to have those re-soled?”

Blivet sighed. “Pass me that ale, will you?”

Before the year had passed, Blivet and Guldhogg had added to their enterprise (mostly at the dragon’s urging) a cockatrice, a pair of hippogriffs who were passionately in love with each other and had decided to run away from their hippogrifc families, plus an expanding retinue of shellycoats, lubber men, bargests, and suchlike other semi-mythical folk. What had once been a compact, convenient man-and-dragon partnership was becoming a sort of strange covert parade traveling from county to county across the center of England.

Guldhogg had hoped the added numbers would make their business easier, because they could now revisit places they had already saved several more times (and not only from ogres or chimeras, but also from less-feared but still unpleasant fates, like a long and painful season of being harried by bogbears). Any gain in income, however, had been offset by the need to keep their gigantic, semi-mythical menagerie hidden, on the move, and—most importantly—fed as they crossed back and forth across the English midlands.

The biggest problem, of course, was that Blivet himself had simply grown weary of marching from town to town, pretending to kill things. He may also have been slightly depressed to find that instead of revering him as a noble dragonslayer, his countrymen now viewed him as little more than a jumped-up exterminator, chasing shellycoats and leprechauns away as if they were so many rats.

Guldhogg couldn’t help noticing that Blivet was going through a great deal of ale, and that he was becoming less and less interested in keeping the now massive operation hidden. The movement of their troop from city to city was threatening to become more parade than stealthy exercise. Already a few humans had joined their train, giving the whole thing more of a feeling of a holiday fair than a serious moneymaking enterprise. Even a dragon could see that it was only a matter of time until some of the townsfolk realized just how badly they had been cozened.

And Guldhogg wasn’t the only one who could see what was coming: Blivet had begun buying his ale in bulk.

The irony, not lost on Guldhogg, was that they could probably have made more money selling the local people tickets to see all the strange animals—they were all happy enough to dump considerable sums at ragged local fairs—but Blivet and the dragon had to work from dawn until long after midnight each day just getting their charges fed and keeping them moving; any greater degree of organization would have been impossible.

Then a narrowly averted tragedy in Smethwick, when a family of werewolves left the troop to hunt for supper and ran into a children’s crusade, finally made it clear to Guldhogg that things had to change. (The near-catastrophe just seemed to make Blivet even more thirsty.)

The dragon recognized that his knightly friend was at a serious crossroads, probably one more septic basilisk bite away from leaving the now-sprawling enterprise behind in search of a calmer life. Guldhogg was an old dragon, and although he was long past his own mating days, he also recognized his friend had a need for nurturing companionship of the sort that even a vast army of bogbears, ogres, and camelopards could not provide.

Two of the newest members of the troop were articulate ravens, raucous, sly, and clever. In exchange for a few shiny articles out of Guldhogg’s now large collection, they agreed to undertake some work for him, hunting the highways and byways of Late Dark Ages Britain for a situation that met the dragon’s specifications.

One day, while the troop was camped by the River Derwent to water the selkies, the ravens returned with the news Guldhogg had been waiting for.

“Haunted Forest?” Blivet looked doubtfully at the sign (and perhaps slightly unsteadily, since he had already been into the ale that morning). Even from the outskirts, the forest the sign announced looked likely to breed nightmares. The trees of the wood grew extremely close together, and they were also extremely large and old, casting such deep shadows that it was almost hard to believe there was turf beneath them. The location beneath lowering mountains was stone silent, and the air of the little valley, far from civilization but close to a major thoroughfare, was dreadful enough to put even the basilisks off their breakfasts (truly not an easy thing to do). “Looks nasty. What monster lurks in here?” the knight asked. “And even if it might be of use to our venture, why should I go look for it instead of you or Ljotunir or one of the other large creatures? I haven’t fought anything dangerous for real in years.”

“Yes, but you are the best judge of monstrous character,” Guldhogg said soothingly. “We all admire your judgment. We also agree your ideas are the finest and most useful.”

Blivet gave him a skeptical look. “Really?”

“Oh, absolutely. Especially when you’re not drinking too much.”

The knight scowled. “You haven’t answered my question. What monster lurks in this unhallowed place?” He shivered a little in the chilly wind that seemed to whistle out of the forest itself rather than from anywhere else.

“Some kind of she-creature,” said Guldhogg offhandedly. “I couldn’t say for certain.”

“And how can anyone care about this she-creature, out in the middle of nowhere?” Blivet looked around. “Honestly, Guldhogg, who would pay to have it dispatched? There isn’t a town within twenty furlongs of this place.” In truth, to Blivet, the dragon seemed a bit nervous. “Are you sure this is the right forest?”

“Oh, absolutely. And there are excellent reasons for you to go in there,” said Guldhogg firmly. “Absolutely, there are. I’ll explain it all later, Blivvy. Go on, now. I’ll be right here, listening. Call if you need me.”

Sir Blivet gave the dragon a last dubious look, then banged down the visor of his helmet, took his lance in his arm, and spurred forward into the trees, perhaps thinking that the sooner he could get this over with, the sooner he could get back to the companionability of an ale-cask, which required no monster-bearding as a price of friendship.

The forest was just as dire inside as it appeared from the outside, shadowed and silent, with the webs of huge but not presently visible spiders swaying in the breeze. Sir Blivet felt as if eyes were watching him at every step, and he had just about decided that he was going to return to the camp and declare the she-beast unfindable when someone called him.

“Sir Knight?”

He turned, his stomach suddenly sour with unease. A robed figure stepped from the shadows and out onto the deer track his horse had been following. “Who are you?” he asked, trying to remember the boldly fearless tone he had been able to summon easily in his younger days, before he knew any better. “Are you in need of assistance?”

“I could be,” the stranger said. “Are you Sir Guldhogg?”

“Sir Gul...” Blivet shook his head in confusion. “No. Guldhogg is a friend of mine, but...” He peered at the shrouded figure, but it was hard to make out much of the face in the hood. “I am in fact Sir Blivet, semi-fabled dragonslayer. Who are you?”

“I am the She-Creature of Haunted Forest.” The newcomer threw back her hood, revealing herself to be a quite attractive short-haired woman of mature years, slender of neck and discerning of eye.