looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first
saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned
out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail." Again his
quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. "It
comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny
and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was
34 Barbara Hambly
to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was
put together, what there was left of it."
"It could be bigger, though, couldn't it?" Gareth asked.
He sounded a little worried, as if. Jenny thought dryly,
he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat pal-
try. "I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of
Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng
Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with
wings that would cover a battalion."
"Anybody measure it?"
"Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to
think of it, according to that variant, when Selkythar
had wounded it unto death the dragon fell into the River
Wildspae; and in a later Belmarie version it says it
fell into the sea. So I don't see how anyone could
have."
"So a sixty-foot dragon is just somebody's measure of
how great Selkythar was." He leaned back in his chair,
his hands absentmindedly tracing over the lunatic carv-
ings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book
of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flick-
ered with a dull sheen in the stray glints of the fire.
"Twenty-seven feet doesn't sound like a lot, 'til it's there
spitting fire at you. You know their flesh will decompose
almost as soon as they die? It's as if their own fire con-
sumes them, as it does everything else."
"Spitting fire?" Gareth frowned. "All the songs say
they breathe it."
Aversin shook his head. "They sort of spit it—it's liq-
uid fire, and nearly anything it touches'!! catch. That's
the trick in fighting a dragon, you see—to stay close
enough to its body that it won't spit fire at you for fear
of burning itself, and not get rolled on or cut to pieces
with its scales whilst you're about it. They can raise the
scales along their sides like a blowfish bristling, and they're
edged like razors."
Dragonsbane 35
"I never knew that," Gareth breathed. Wonder and
curiosity lessened, for a moment, the shell of his offended
dignity and pride.
"Well, the pity of it is, probably the King's champions
didn't either. God knows, I didn't when I went after the
dragon in the gorge. There was nothing about it in any
book I could find—Dotys and Clivy and them. Only a
few old granny-rhymes that mention dragons—or drakes
or worms, they're called—and they weren't much help.
Things like:
"Cock by its feet, horse by its hame,
Snake by its head, drake by its name.
"Or what Polyborus had in his Analects about cer-
tain villages believing that if you plant loveseed—those
creeper-things with the purple trumpet-flowers on them—
around your house, dragons won't come near. Jen and I
used bits of that kind of lore—Jen brewed a poison from
the loveseed to put on my harpoons, because it was obvious
on the face of it that no fiddling little sword was going to
cut through those scales. And the poison did slow the
thing down. But I don't know near as much about them
as I'd like."
"No." Jenny turned her eyes at last from the fire's
throbbing core and, resting her cheek upon her hand where
it lay on her up-drawn knees, regarded the two men on
either side of the book-cluttered table. She spoke softly,
half to herself. "We know not where they come from, nor
where they breed; why of all the beasts of the earth they
have six limbs instead of four..."
"'Maggots from meat,'" quoted John, '"weevils from
rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.' That's in Terens'
Of Ghosts. Or Caerdinn's 'Save a dragon, slave a dragon.'
Or why they say you should never look into a dragon's
eyes—and I'll tell you. Gar, I was gie careful not to do
36 Barbara Hambly
that. We don't even know simple things, like why magic
and illusion won't work on them; why Jen couldn't call
the dragon's image in that jewel of hers, or use a cloaking-
spell against his notice—nothing."
"Nothing," Jenny said softly, "save how they died,
slain by men as ignorant of them as we."
John must have beard the strange sorrov/ that underlay
her voice, for she felt his glance, worried and questioning.
But she turned her eyes away, not knowing the answer
to what he asked.
After a moment, John sighed and said to Gareth, "It's
all knowledge that's been lost over the years, like Luciard's
Firegiver and how they managed to build a breakwater
across the harbor mouth at Eldsbouch—knowledge that's
been lost and may never be recovered."
He got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, the flat,
whitish gray reflections from the window winking on spike
and mail-scrap and the brass of dagger-hilt and buckle.
"We're living in a decaying world. Gar; things slipping
away day by day. Even you, down south in Bel—you're
losing the Realm a piece at a time, with the Winterlands
tearing off in one direction and the rebels pulling away
the Marches in another. You're losing what you had and
don't even know it, and all that while knowledge is leaking
out the seams, like meal from a ripped bag, because there
isn't time or leisure to save it.
"I would never have slain the dragon. Gar—slay it,
when we know nothing about it? And it was beautiful in
itself, maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes
on, every color of it perfect as sunset, like a barley field
in certain lights you get on summer evenings."
"But you must—you have to slay ours!" There was
sudden agony in Gareth's voice.
"Fighting it and slaying it are two different things."
John turned back from the window, his head tipped slightly
to one side, regarding the boy's anxious face. "And I
Dragons bane 37
haven't yet said I'd undertake the one, let alone accom-
plish the other."
"But you have to." The boy's voice was a forlorn whis-
per of despair. "You're our only hope."
"Am I?" the Dragonsbane asked gently. "I'm the only
hope of all these villagers, through the coming winter,
against wolves and bandits. It was because I was their
only hope that I slew the most perfect creature I'd ever
seen, slew it dirtily, filthily, chopping it to pieces with an
ax—it was because I was their only hope that I fought it
at all and near had my flesh shredded from my bones by
it. I'm only a man, Gareth."
"No!" the boy insisted desperately. "You're the
Dragonsbane—the only Dragonsbane!" He rose
to his
feet, some inner struggle plain upon his thin features, his
breathing fast as if forcing himself to some exertion. "The
King..." He swallowed hard. "The King told me to make
whatever terms I could, to bring you south. If you come..."
With an effort he made his voice steady. "If you come,
we will send troops again to protect the northlands, to
defend them against the Iceriders; we will send books,
and scholars, to bring knowledge to the people again. I
swear it." He took up the King's seal and held it out in
his trembling palm, and the cold daylight flashed palely
across its face. "In the King's name I swear it."
But Jenny, watching the boy's white face as he spoke,
saw that he did not meet John's eyes.
As night came on the rain increased, the wind throwing
it like sea-breakers against the walls of the Hold. John's
Aunt Jane brought up a cold supper of meat, cheese, and
beer, which Gareth picked at with the air of one doing
his duty. Jenny, sitting cross-legged in the comer of the
hearth, unwrapped her harp and experimented with its
tuning pegs while the men spoke of the roads that led
south, and of the slaying of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.
38 Barbara Hambly
"That's another thing that wasn't like the songs," Gar-
eth said, resting his bony elbows amid the careless scatter
of John's notes on the table. "In the songs the dragons
are all gay-colored, gaudy. But this one is black, dead-
black all over save for the silver lamps of its eyes."
"Black," repeated John quietly, and looked over at
Jenny. "You had an old list, didn't you, love?"
She nodded, her hands resting in the delicate maneu-
verings of the harp pegs. "Caerdinn had me memorize
many old lists," she explained to Gareth. "Some of them
he told me the meaning of—this one he never did. Perhaps
he didn't know himself. It was names, and colors..." She
closed her eyes and repeated the list, her voice falling
into the old man's singsong chant, the echo of dozens of
voices, back through the length of years. "Teltrevir helio-
trope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold; Astirith is
primrose and black; Morkeleb alone, black as night...
The list goes on—there were dozens of names, if names
they are." She shrugged and linked her fingers over the
curve of the harp's back. "But John tells me that the old
dragon that was supposed to haunt the shores of the lake
of Wevir in the east was said to have been blue as the
waters, marked all over his back with patterns of gold so
that he could lie beneath the surface of the lake in summer
and steal sheep from the banks."
"Yes!" Gareth almost bounced out of his chair with
enthusiasm as he recognized the familiar tale. "And the
Worm of Wevir was slain by Antara Warlady and her
brother Darthis Dragonsbane in the last part of the reign
of Yvain the Well-Beloved, who was..." He caught him-
self up again, suddenly embarrassed. "It's a popular tale,"
he concluded, red-faced.
Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebul-
lience. "There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes,
really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got
them right."
Dragonsbane 39
She put her harp to her shoulder, a small instrument
that had also been Caerdinn's, though he had not played
it; the wood was darkened almost black with age. By
daylight it appeared perfectly unadorned, but when fire-
light glanced across it, as it did now, the circles of the air
and sea were sometimes visible, traced upon it in faded
gold. Carefully, she picked out those strange, sweet knots
of sound, sometimes two or three notes only, sometimes
a string of them like a truncated air. They were individual
in the turns of their timing, hauntingly half-familiar, like
things remembered from childhood; and as she played she
repeated the names: Teltrevir heliotrope, Centhwevir is
blue knotted with gold... It was part of the lost knowl-
edge, like that from John's scatterbrained, jackdaw quest
in the small portion of his time not taken up with the
brutal demands of the Winterlands. Notes and words were
meaningless now, like a line from a lost ballad, or a few
torn pages from the tragedy of an exiled god, pasted to
keep wind from a crack—the echoes of songs that would
not be heard again.
From them her hands moved on, random as her passing
thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs
and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an
inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future
time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that
held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sor-
rows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called
the soul like the distant glitter of stardust banners in the
by the hearth a tin pennywhistle, such as children played
in the streets, and joined its thin, bright music to hers,
dancing around the shadowed beauty of the harp like a
thousand-year-old child.
Music answered music, joining into a spell-circle that
banished, for a time, the strange tangle of fear and grief
and dragonfire in Jenny's heart. Whatever would come
40 Barbara Humbly
to pass, this was what they were and had, now. She tossed
back the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright
flicker of Aversin's eyes behind his thick spectacles, the
pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into
dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds. As the evening
deepened, the Hold folk drifted up to the study to join
them, sitting where they could on the floor or the hearth
or in the deep embrasures of the windows: John's Aunt
Jane and Cousin Dilly and others of the vast tribe of his
female relatives who lived at the Hold; lan and Adric;
the fat, jovial smith Muffle; all part of the pattern of the
life of the Winterlands that was so dull-seeming at first,
but was in truth close-woven and complex as its random
plaids. And among them Gareth sat, ill at ease as a bright
southern parrot in a rookery. He kept looking about him
with puzzled distaste in the leaping restlessness of the red
firelight that threw into momentary brightness the mold-
ery rummage of decaying books, of rocks and chemical
experiments, and that glowed in the children's eyes and
made amber mirrors of the dogs'—wondering, Jenny
thought, how a quest as glorious as his could possibly
have ended in such a place.
And every now and then, she noticed, his eyes returned
to John. There was in them not only anxiety, but a kind
of nervous dread, as if he were haunted by a gnawing
guilt for something he had done, or something he knew
he must yet do.
"Will you go?" Jenny asked softly, much later in the
night,
lying in the warm nest of bearskins and patchwork
with her dark hair scattered like sea-wrack over John's
breast and arm.
"If I slay his dragon for him, the King will have to
listen to me," John said reasonably. "If I come at his
calling, I must be his subject, and if I am—we are—his
subjects, as King he owes us the protection of his troops.
Dragonsbane 41
If I'm not his subject..." He paused, as he thought over
what his next words would mean about the Law of the
Realm for which he had so long fought. He sighed and
let the thought go.
For a time the silence was broken only by the groan
of wind in the tower overhead and the drumming of the
rain on the walls. But even had she not been able to see,
catlike, in the dark, Jenny knew John did not sleep. There
was a tension in all his muscles, and the uneasy knowledge
of how narrow had been the margin between living and
dying, when he had fought the Golden Dragon of Wyr.
Her hand under his back could still feel the rucked, hard
ridges of scar.
"Jenny," he said at last, "my father told me that his
dad used to be able to raise four and five hundred of militia
when the Iceriders came. They fought pitched battles on
the edge of the northern ocean and marched in force to
break the strongholds of the bandit-kings that used to
cover the eastward roads. When that band of brigands
attacked Far West Riding the year before last, do you
remember how many men we could come up with, the
mayor of Riding, the mayor of Toby, and myself among
us? Less than a hundred, and twelve of those we lost in
that fight."
As he moved his head, the banked glow of the hearth
on the other side of the small sanctum of their bedchamber