The Dragon in Lyonesse Page 6

  She had gotten back at him after all. Jim had simply assumed his ward would protect him against accident and unexpected wounds. That was an automatic coverage of the ordinary personal ward, in addition to whatever else it was set up to Protect from. He had been a little surprised to get away with facing her down over Brian's transportation home in a hurry. He had been right to be surprised. He hadn't.

  "Thank you," said Jim.

  Graceful acknowledgment of being bested. Only thing to do. And he was immediately back in the Great Hall of Malencontri, with Dafydd, Geronde and Brian all looking at him.

  "Something wrong?" he asked, sitting down, "You were hardly gone a minute, Jim!" said Angie.

  "Indeed," said Dafydd, "the time was very short. Did something go amiss?" "Oh, no!," Jim said. "Everything went well. Piece of cake. I'm now prepared to send you home on a moment's notice, Brian. Or send all of us home on a moment's notice if it comes to that. The swiftness of it was just one of those things that happens when magic goes smoothly."

  He laughed cheerfully. But the chill persisted as well. He kept up his outward smile. There were a number of uncomfortable possibilities, according to what she had said, waiting for them in Lyonesse.

  He laughed, admiring Kineteté for the exactness with which she had returned him to the time he had asked for. She had not been exaggerating when she said she never forgot anything—but that thought was a sobering one. Her final words came back to him. If she was that good at keeping promises, there was that uncomfortable little bit about woe to him at her hands if he was careless or wasteful with the borrowed magic. Ah, well…

  He kept his smile, firmly setting to one side memory of Kineteté's comments about his survival. Cross those bridges when he came to them.

  That evening at bedtime, just before they settled down for the night, he showed Angie the magic glasses he had made. They were just about as good-looking as glasses for him could get, he thought—with thin gold rims and earpieces—"temples," he remembered the oculist calling them. They were about as unnoticeable as spectacles could be; but were protected against breakage by a ward.

  "Jim, they look stunning!" said Angie, trying them on herself. "Oh, but Jim—you don't need bifocals yet, do you? There's some kind of a line between the upper and lower parts of the lenses!"

  "An idea of my own, in fact," said Jim, feeling a touch of complacency. "You see, I had to make them so they'd react to any color around me, whether I was deliberately noticing or not; and I might not be noticing if—well, for example, if there was something like a glare in my eyes. So the lower halves are the part that shows color—more brightly than I'd see it with the naked eye, actually." He pointed a finger at a lens while she still wore the glasses.

  "In contrast," he went on, "the upper half will still show the black-and-silver, but will shield me from glare, a bit. They're something like sunglasses, in principle—the kind that get darker the brighter the light is."

  "That was clever of you," said Angie. She took the spectacles off and held them at arm's length toward the flame of their single candle on the candlestick stand of her side of the bed. "Yes, it does! Well, that was a good idea. Now all I have to worry about is your getting mixed up in something dangerous."

  And Kineteté's promise about what would happen to him if he did not use his borrowed magic right, thought Jim. But there was no reason for Angie to have that worrying her.

  He leaned over her, and blew the candle out.

  Chapter Seven

  I wish I could go in with you, too," said the Sea Devil, wistfully, looking at the green land under a bright yellow sun that lay beyond what seemed no more than the cliff-high edge of an atmosphere of ordinary air.

  "We can take him, can't we, m'Lord?" asked Hob, who at the moment was riding on Jim's back—a feather's weight there, only. "I'm afraid not," Jim said. "He's not allowed."

  "That's right, very wee Hob," said Rrrnlf. "We Sea Devils can go anywhere—except where we're not allowed. Places like this Drowned Land are unallowed."

  They were finally descending the last hundred of many hundred feet of deep salt ocean. The four horses—Gorp, Blanchard, Dafydd's light but courageous roan stallion, and Jim's sumpter horse—were enclosed in a calming enchantment and held in one enormous Sea Devil hand. Rrrnlf's other hand carried Jim, Brian, and Dafydd in another ward, but without the calming enchantment—which had a side effect of dulling the senses. Both sets of passengers were completely protected from the crushing pressure at this great depth—and the horses, at least, were completely indifferent to their surroundings. Brian and Dafydd appeared indifferent, too; but Jim knew that in any unusual place and situation, that was the way they would strive to appear.

  As for Jim, he was occupied.

  He knew that a properly set-up ward was unbreakable, of course, so he could have been as indifferent as the horses; but at the moment he had gotten himself particularly interested in the manner in which they would enter the air-wall between sea and the Drowned Land. He had not thought to pay any attention to it the one time they had entered it before, on their way to the Gnarly Kingdom.

  His attention was all on the approaching fields of the Drowned Land, and the feet of Rrrnlf's thirty-plus-foot body, as they crossed the seabed rapidly. If he just kept watching carefully… Jim told himself.

  Rrrnlf stooped and pressed the two wards—invisible, of course, but undoubtedly very solid feeling in his two hands—and pushed them hard against the surface where water met air. They stopped moving suddenly.

  "That's as far as I can take you, wee people," he said.

  He turned his wrists around—widdershins, Jim noted—and the front surfaces of the wards went through the wall. Rrrnlf let them go and stepped back.

  "That is all and more than needed, good Rrrnlf," Jim answered. The Sea Devil raised a hand, then simply vanished.

  Jim was pleased with himself. Watching closely, with eyes now trained in magic, he had caught the briefest possible glint of a circular swirl in the air—like the swirl in the water made by a fish, just under the surface of a lake, when it turned suddenly in quick fright from a baited hook it had been investigating.

  Then Dafydd's hand was through the air-wall into the land beyond, his body followed it, and Jim and Brian followed him. To their right the horses were following Dafydd's roan steed out in the same way.

  "Hah!" said Jim, delighted and out loud, without thinking. "Of course. The simplest thing in the world! The Witch's Gate!"

  "Witches?" said Brian, suddenly and sharply staring around him. "Where, James?"

  "No. I mean, none, Brian. It was just a manner of speaking. I was pondering on a point of magic, that was all, and spoke up without thinking."

  "Shall we mount and go, Sirs?" said Dafydd, almost sharply.

  Mounting his roan as Jim and Brian also mounted, Dafydd led them inland from the shore onto the greensward.

  "—Is this land all pastureland like this?" Brian asked Dafydd.

  "No," said the archer. He had straightened somewhat since they had left their wards behind; and seemed taller than Jim was used to seeing him. "There are clumps of trees, but no real forests. But farther in, the land becomes rugged and rises to small mountains. As you start down the farther side of that you enter the Borderland—Drowned Land country, but a wild place where rough forest starts; and that forest becomes the forest of Lyonesse in no large distance."

  Dafydd, as suited a prince in his own country—as he was here—now rode first, followed by Jim and Brian—Brian on a Blanchard who, for a wonder, this one time did not seem disposed to push himself ahead of Dafydd's roan. It was as if even the destrier was recognizing the present difference in rank. Now it was Brian who had tied to his saddle the lead rope of the sumpter horse that carried their baggage.

  It was the same sumpter horse that had carried their baggage on their earlier trip through here to Gnarlyland. There had been a general feeling on the part of the stable hands at Malencontri that it would be bad luck to take a dif
ferent horse if the original horse was still available

  The horses, in fact, were all on their best manners. Jim had been half afraid the sudden change of scene might at least have spooked Brian's Blanchard—who could take offense at almost anything unexpected. But on this occasion, he had accepted the magical shift in scene with indifference.

  The roan himself, beautiful but lighter than the two destriers of Brian and Jim, was typical of the horses they had seen on their previous trip through the Drowned Land. He plainly loved the man he carried; as, for that matter, did Blanchard love his own rider, Brian—once, Jim had seen the big destrier, for all his usual tantrums and demands for first place, refuse to take shelter one cold, rainy night, to stand in the open over his unconscious master. When Gorp had long since taken shelter under one of the heavy-leafed surrounding trees.

  Dafydd, Jim and Brian had discovered, could ride, and ride well, when the need was there, although he preferred under ordinary conditions to travel afoot. In fact, Jim had never seen him on the roan until this last year; and it was only a few months back that he spoke about it to Dafydd, when it occurred to him to ask the name of the roan. The answer had been enlightening.

  "Owen?" Jim had echoed the name—for Dafydd's life was spent among the English nowadays; and Owen had been the name of a Welsh leader who had been a real thorn in the side of those English trying to conquer and subdue Wales. "You named him Owen?"

  "I did. He is named after Owen Glendower," Dafydd had replied.

  "I guessed as much. But why that particular name?" asked Jim.

  "I did that, so when, as has happened, some Englishman might ask me his name, I could answer it was Owen. Then if the man should further ask how I should give a horse such a strange-sounding name, I could reply he was named after Owen Glendower; and if that same man should then wonder who Owen Glendower might be—then, if need be, I could take him aside and explain it to his full understanding."

  Obviously, such an "explanation" might become a physically active one. Dafydd continually spoke of himself as "not a man of great dispute," but it was remarkable the way dispute came and found him. He was, in truth, always soft-voiced and polite to everyone. But even as an archer, he carried himself like a prince; and this was more than enough to make him a walking challenge to some other males.

  Plainly, the name had been Dafydd's way of educating some of the English about a Welsh hero, the leader of the uprising there earlier in this century. It had been Wales's last strong bid to free itself from English rule, from what Jim remembered from his history—which, admittedly, was not always a perfect match for the history of this world.

  Clearly, the horse Owen seemed to share much of the same attitude as his rider. At no time when they had been together had he challenged the larger Gorp or Blanchard, as stallions were sometimes prone to do—Blanchard very much so. But once when Blanchard had moved to domineer over him, Owen had responded like a screaming fury, attacking the heavier warhorse so swiftly he had appeared to be the one who had started the fight. Luckily, on that one occasion, the stable hands at Malencontri had got the two into separate stalls before any real damage was done on either side.

  At any rate, so far, things had gone well. Hopefully, the King of the Drowned Land would be able to tell them more about the Dark Powers trying to take over Lyonesse—and his Kingdom, as well—

  Jim's thoughts broke off suddenly; for a rider was coming toward them at a speed that raised a spreading cloud of dust from the unpaved road behind him. Dafydd raised a hand and reined Owen to a stop. Jim and Brian both rode forward a few steps to come up close to—but not quite level with—him, and also reined in to await the coming of the approaching rider.

  He was with them in moments, and hauled his sweating, pawing horse to a stop. But the first words he spoke to Dafydd were in the language of the Drowned Land, which neither Jim nor Brian understood. Jim could have used his magic to interpret, but he felt vaguely that this might be a little like listening at keyholes. He and Brian waited.

  The conversation was brief. Dafydd listened to what the horseman had to say and spoke to him briefly. Then he turned to Jim and Brian.

  "Madog, here, will stay with you and guide you safely to the border of Lyonesse. He will take you to a different place on that border than the one we crossed at before to get to the entrance of the Gnarly Kingdom. I must leave you here."

  "But you said nothing of this earlier!" said Brian. "I thought we would all pause while you saw your King—perhaps a day or two—and then you would go on with us."

  "Matters have arisen," said Dafydd. "In brief, the King is ill. Deathly ill; and his one living son, who has been hidden for his own safety, for reasons that are privy to those very close to the King—is now revealed. He is wise beyond his years, but still too young in my King's mind to take on the responsibility of the Kingdom, with this threat heavy above us. I must go to the King now, while he lives. Madog will see you well to the border and I will join you there in Lyonesse as soon as I can. Farewell for now."

  He lifted the reins, and Owen broke almost immediately into a gallop, building to a swiftness that might well have given Blanchard a run for Brian's money. Jim had little doubt of which horse would win over a distance, however. Blanchard was so remarkable as to be almost a freak. In spite of his weight and size, endless power seemed stored in his great-chested body. It was almost visible, radiating from him, to any who saw him—the element that had made Chandos and others speak of him so highly.

  Jim sat Gorp now, feeling strangely deserted and exposed by Dafydd's sudden leaving. He and Brian looked at Madog, sitting his wet horse and waiting for their attention.

  The man was dressed exactly as had been others of the King's personal guards they had seen on their previous visit to the Drowned Land. In fact, he could have been one of those they had seen then, an escort mounted on beautiful, but small, bay horses—like the one he rode now. He carried a light spear held upright in a boot by his right toe, and was clad in armor of boiled leather reinforced by plates of metal. He also wore a helmet of antique style, with a nasal bar that left his facial area open. Hanging from his waist was a dark leather scabbard that held a slim, flat sword with a small silver hilt.

  Behind the nasal bar, his face was tanned and sharp-boned, with keen brown eyes. There was something restless, eager, and potentially explosive—as Owen had been—about him.

  "Do you speak English?" Jim asked him.

  Madog shook his head, but half turned his horse and pointed ahead along the road they had been following. He said something in the same liquid language that he and Dafydd had spoken together.

  "Clearly," said Brian, "he waits for us to follow him."

  Jim nodded. They put their horses into motion, the sumpter horse shrugging as she necessarily followed on her lead rope; and, behind the Drowned Land soldier, they went on their way, now at a trot instead of the walking pace they had been using before.

  "Meseemeth," said Brian judiciously, "that this fellow is eager to discharge the duty Dafydd laid upon him and get back to others more familiar."

  "I wouldn't doubt it," answered Jim.

  They followed Madog in silence for perhaps half an hour; and though the landscape on each side of the road continued much the same, they began to see, along the horizon ahead, either rugged hills or distant mountains. Shortly, they also saw a whiteness ahead but off to their left; and as they moved on, it resolved itself into a city, its buildings—some of them of surprising height—apparently constructed of some marblelike material. A little later the wide road they were on divided, sending another route, equally wide, off in the direction of the city.

  Madog, however, continued to lead them straight on for some distance, then branched off onto a narrow road to their right. Jim looked ahead with some surprise. It did not seem that they had covered so much distance, but now the mountains ahead were a great deal closer.

  As they went on, their new road narrowed; more so when the ground began to slope upward int
o the flanks of the nearest mountains. Shortly, it had dwindled to little more than a bridle path on which it was only just possible for two to travel side by side.

  They were higher up now, and the mountain was beginning to live up to that name. Under the horses' hooves earth had given way to rock, loose chips of reddish white stone on which the metal of horseshoes slipped; and uneven surfaces of the same rock, unbroken. The sumpter horse, not usually taken far from Malencontri, had not been considered worth horseshoeing, and was having an easier time of it. So, Jim noticed, was the horse of the royal guardsman up ahead. Of course, he told himself, the Drowned Land must almost certainly have sunk beneath the waves long before the medieval invention of the horseshoe.

  "James!" said Brian in a low voice, behind him.

  Jim turned his head. Brian was reining Blanchard close in beside him as they climbed; and Jim could hear the hard breathing of the warhorse.

  "What is it?" he asked in an equally low voice, for Brian was clearly not trusting to the soldier's claim that he could not understand English.

  "Have you noticed?" Brian said. "The shadow. Does it not seem to you to be going along with us?"

  Jim, deep in his own thoughts, had not. But now he looked up at the sky, clear and blue save for a few puffy clouds on the northern horizon,, and at the mountainside, brightly lit in the afternoon light, with its wealth of dry stone riverbeds and spires. No visible shadow showed; but he knew what Brian meant. Now that he gave it his attention, he felt its presence—the darkness they had noticed in the Great Hall. There was no doubt.

  "Yes," he said.

  "It is watching us, you think?"

  "Maybe," said Jim, "but also maybe it seems to follow everyone who knows it's there."

  "I think it follows us, especially," said Brian. He reached for the hilt of his sword and loosened it in its scabbard. "I would counsel that we be alert for attack."