The Dragon in Lyonesse Read online

  "Ah!" he cried. "Long have I waited here! And now ye shall die, unless ye save your life by a foul deed."

  "Foul deed?" echoed Jim, reining Gorp in hard. "What's all this?"

  "It is my curse—fetch my horse and forget not the lance," he added to the closest of the armed servitors, who ran back into the pavilion. "I had a curse laid on me that I should never have wife nor children, though I would always be able to find a maiden I loved. But once I had, I must fight with the first knight who came this way. If I won, the knight I fought might have his life spared only by one act. He must strike off the head of the maiden I loved. Only if the passing knight overcame me and showed me mercy would I be free to marry and know happiness and family."

  "Well." said Jim, and ran out of words, his mind busily hunting for a way to get out of this situation. He was only too aware of how little skill he had with the lance, or any other weapons—in spite of Brian's efforts to teach him. Furthermore, he was enough of a magician to know how complicated a curse like that would be, and how much magical energy would have to be invested in making it.

  More likely, he thought, the knight was given to delusions. So it would not be possible to simply talk him out of believing as he did. An excuse in his own terms was the only thing that would work.

  "What a sad shame it is, then," said Jim, "that I've only this one lance I ride with. It is consecrated; to be used only against a certain, especially foul foe. A knight who has committed so great a sin it cannot be named. But don't worry. Someone's bound to come along who can beat you."

  "Never!" said the knight; and to Jim's embarrassment, he saw that the other had begun to shed tears. "For another part of my curse is that no one but a man who was never born on earth can best me. But joust you must, for fight I must; and I have no lack of spears."

  He turned his head.

  "Bring another lance!" he shouted into the pavilion.

  "Hob," said Jim in a low voice, "if I made some smoke in a hurry, could you carry me past this place?"

  "Not when you're wearing all that armor and weapons, m'Lord. You're too heavy. Er—m'Lord, with your grace—I think I'll wait for now on the sumpter horse."

  "You might as well," said Jim gloomily. He reached down to untie the sumpter horse's lead rope, and simply let it fall to the ground. Where were his brains? There had to be some way of avoiding this nonsense.

  The retainer came out with two lances under one arm and leading a saddled and bridled warhorse, the color of pale mist over a black swamp on a cloud-dark, early morning.

  The knight wiped his eyes with a large forefinger, shook the wetness off the finger, and took one of the lances. He climbed into the saddle of the mist-colored horse. The retainer brought the other lance to Jim, took Jim's lance carefully from its socket on the right side of his saddle, and laid it reverently on the grass.

  Jim balanced the lance he now held. It felt strange, for it was a good deal lighter than those Brian had trained him with. It was, in fact, little more than a pole with a steel point on its end. Untypically at a loss to think of any further excuse, Jim turned with the long weapon balanced in his hand, to face the knight of the pavilion.

  It was well he did. Without any further challenge or warning, the knight had already put his horse in motion and was coming at him.

  Belatedly, Jim got Gorp moving. He did not have time to bring his horse up to full gallop; but, fortunately, just as the lance he had been given had turned out to be lighter than what he was used to, so the knight's mount was both smaller and lighter than Gorp. Jim found himself approaching the knight with their combined speeds at slightly better than ten miles an hour.

  Jim was doing his best to hold the spear loosely until the moment of impact, as Brian had taught him; but looking along its length at the foe thundering toward him, his spearpoint seemed to be wavering and bobbing all over the landscape. He tried to hold it more on target, but without tightening up. It was no use—and now the knight was upon him.

  At the last second Jim, for the first time without being reminded of it by Brian, remembered what his friend had tried to hammer into him—slant your shield! Holding the heavy shield high to cover his head as well as his upper body, he angled the face of it to the left.

  There was a sickening impact, and the point of the knight's lance shot past him on his left. Gorp collided with the other horse and knocked the lighter animal to the ground, with its rider still in the saddle.

  The knight pulled himself loose from his steed just in time to avoid being pinned as it fell, staggered to his feet looking dazed, and pulled his sword by what must have been more reflex than anything else.

  The collision had brought Gorp to a standstill, however, and Jim had profited by the time that gave him to get his own sword out first. From the advantage of the height of Gorp's saddle, he hesitated for only a fraction of a second before, wincing but desperate, he brought the edge of it down with all his strength—again as Brian had taught him—on the side of the knight's simple, old-fashioned helm, which had only a steel nasal bar to protect his face.

  The steel head covering was proof against the edge of Jim's sword; but the padding between helm and head in the era this armor came from was nothing to write home about. The knight dropped.

  He came to within seconds. But Jim was already off Gorp's back and had the point of his weapon at the other's throat.

  "Yield, damn you!" he panted, without stopping to think that this was hardly the chivalrous way to ask a fellow knight to surrender.

  The knight made a sudden, convulsive move to squirm sideways from under the sword point, but by that time, Jim was on his knees, this time with the sword edge against his opponent's throat.

  "I yield me, gentle knight," said the other. "Never in all my life have I been bested—nor thought I could be—so swiftly. You are one of great prowess. Though, if my steed had not fallen, perhaps—but such talk is idle. I pray your mercy; which I have never given the knight in no such work of arms, myself, and which you will refuse, of course."

  "That need not be," said Jim, now remembering the proper way to talk in such situations, "for you on your part are better than anyone else I have ever met in such a wayside bicker as this. I grant you your life—on one condition only. That is that you swear upon your honor to immediately take to wife that maiden I see yonder, if indeed she it is whom you love."

  "That will I, and gladly," said the knight. "For this day sees the hope fulfilled which I had given up long since. Yet do I repent me that fought so poorly as to be defeated."

  "Don't blame yourself," said Jim. "It just chances that of all knights now alive, I happen to be the only one who was not born on this earth."

  "And is this so?" The knight leaped up. His sword was still in his hand, but he threw it from him and clasped Jim in a rib-threatening embrace. "Then my curse is broken and I will be a happy man all the rest of my days. Ye are my savior and I and my family-to-be will never cease from blessing your name. Pray tell it me."

  Jim felt the cold hand of a reasonless caution on the back of his neck. Certainly it ought to do no harm to mention his name. Still, he hesitated.

  "Alas," he said, "I'm forbidden to tell anyone that. But you can think of me as the Knight-Dragon—and now I've got to keep going."

  "Farewell and Godspeed, then, Sir Knight-Dragon," said the knight, turning to hurry to the maiden, who—seeing him come—began to hurry to him. Jim picked up his own lance and remounted Gorp, and felt a sudden small pressure at his back.

  "I am with you again, my Lord," Hob said.

  "Welcome back," said Jim. He looked over his shoulder as he rode off with the sumpter horse nodding along behind him at the end of the lead rope again. The knight and the maiden were entwined in each other's arms; and it looked to Jim as if both of them were now weeping—happily, he trusted.

  It was not until they were lost to sight behind him in the forest that it occurred to Jim why he had been right in avoiding the telling of his name. Any magic-maker gained
a certain amount of power over another simply by discovering that one's right name; and Morgan le Fay, who could be watching him in the Lyonesse equivalent of a scrying glass, right now, was most certainly a magic-maker who, by simply knowing he was in Lyonesse and a beginning magician, knew too much about him already.

  His thoughts moved to different possible dangers.

  "Hob," he said, "you mentioned other people we'd meet on our way out of this wood. How many more of them do we still have to run into; and what are they like?"

  "Oh, just two, my Lord. That is, only two important people. One will be a great black horse; and he will have a bad-tempered little man with him. The other is a poor little bird tied to the limb of a tree; and with her a plant that squeaks and squawks so loudly you can hear it a long way before you see it. It says it knows you, m'Lord. It has big, drooping green leaves; and it said it had told you its name, but you were impolite and didn't tell it yours. It wanted me to tell it what your name was; but it commanded me to tell, instead of just asking, so I wouldn't."

  "Good," said Jim. He realized that he should have thought of this before. "Don't tell anyone my name, Hob, while we're here. Will you remember not to do that?"

  "Oh, yes, my Lord. I never forget anything."

  They rode on. That is to say, Jim rode on, Hob flew on, Gorp and the sumpter horse paced forward. Jim, however, was not thinking of those with him. His mind was occupied with the fact that he had been extraordinarily lucky to come out safe and sound from his combat with the knight—to say nothing of winning. It had been that one piece of advice from Brian on fourteenth-century weapon-handling, plus the advantage of Gorp's size and weight, that had brought him through it unharmed.

  He must do some thinking, he told himself, about how to avoid such fights from now on. This Forest Dedale seemed to be a place of adventures right out of the original legends about King Arthur and his Knights. Almost anyone else he encountered most likely would not only be thoroughly trained in using weapons, but powerful with them, as a result of frequent use. In a fair and even combat with an opponent like that, he probably wouldn't stand a chance of coming out alive.

  If he could only stay alive long enough to find Brian, he might stand more of a chance. Meanwhile, what he was going to need was an all-purpose good excuse for not fighting…

  "There they are, m'Lord!" chirped Hob at his right ear.

  "Already?" They had just reached the open fringe of trees bordering a clear area on the side of what could be called either a large stream or a small river. The remarkable thing about this stream, however, was that its waters seemed to be racing along at a speed Jim guessed to be around thirty miles an hour. In level country, how could it have built up such a speed—the race of a high mountain stream throwing itself down a precipitous slope?

  Magic again! thought Jim, with immediate suspicion—but a second thought reminded him that the magic energy required to move such a volume of water continuously had to be mind-boggling. One way would be to remodel the countryside to create a high altitude farther up the river; but for such a speed, that higher ground would have to be very high, and very near. But he could see no sign of a hill or mountain upstream, looming over the treetops there.

  Something else was at work here besides magic—figure that out later.

  Now that he took his attention off the rushing stream, what caught his gaze was a very flimsy-looking, floating bridge crossing it. At the near end of the bridge a small tent was pitched; and outside the tent, apparently untethered, stood what might be the largest horse he had ever seen, a horse the color of the black water of a swamp just before the sun's rise. It was standing equipped with saddle, saddle-clothes, and bridle of the same color.

  Jim reined up. He leaned forward in his saddle to get a better look through the thin screen of branches. "Where's that little man you talked about?"

  "I think he must be in the tent, my Lord."

  "What're he and the horse doing—guarding that bridge?"

  "I don't know, my Lord. The man seemed to think I was some kind of bird. He waved his hands and shooed me away."

  "Well, here we go, then," said Jim, starting Gorp forward at a walk. The sumpter horse followed sulkily.

  The black horse paid no attention to them as they came clear of the woods.

  Jim kept Gorp at a slow walk.

  "Hob?" he said.

  "Yes, my Lord?" came the little creature's voice, now from between his shoulder blades. Jim noticed that the little hobgoblin had been enunciating "my Lord," recently, rather than slurring it to "m'Lord," as was customary at Malencontri. He wondered if that might be some reaction to their being in Lyonesse.

  "Good," said Jim, "you're still there. Stay there for the moment and don't say anything or make a noise. I'll give you a chance to leave me without being noticed, if you want that. I'll tell you when it's safe to go."

  The closer he got to the tent, which appeared half black, half white—seeming black where the shadow of a great tree on the other side of the rushing water fell on it, and pure white in the part that was in the sun—the more puzzled he was. No one came out of the tent to challenge his presence, though he was close enough now for the creak and jingle of his horses' harnesses to be heard. The black horse himself did not look in Jim's direction, though horses were usually curious about the approach of others of their kind, and stallions particularly watchful for other stallions.

  It was as if he and his two animals were not there at all.

  "What is it, my Lord?" asked the muted voice of Hob in his ear.

  "Just sit tight and be quiet," whispered Jim. He turned Gorp around, caught a disgusted make-up-your-mind look briefly from the sumpter horse, and led the way back toward the forest edge.

  Once far enough inside it so that he would be more or less out of sight from the tent, but able to see it and everything else in the clearing from between the tree trunks, Jim pulled Gorp to a halt, turned around once more, and looked back at the scene they had just left.

  "Hob," he said, "you can see that black horse, can't you? Of course you can, because you told me about seeing it earlier."

  "That's right, my Lord. And I can see him now."

  "But you're a Natural and I'm a human—"

  "Pray pardon, my Lord, but what does a Knight or Magickian have to do to become a Human?"

  "They're both human to begin with," said Jim. "All people are human."

  "It isn't a special name, got for doing something brave?"

  "No," said Jim. "Unfortunately."

  "Oh. But, my Lord—"

  "Not now, Hob," said Jim. "We've got other things to think about. We both see the black horse. He's paying no attention to us. If he was just a magic illusion, though, an animal wouldn't see him, because magic won't work on them. The horses could tell us—our horses—if they were able to talk. They don't act like they see it at all; and it doesn't act as if it sees them. I wish horses could talk."

  "Are you through saying what you were saying, my Lord?" asked Hob timidly.

  "For the moment. Did you have something to tell me?"

  "Just—horses can do a sort of talking. But most of it's twitching their ears and baring their teeth, and things like that. If they think something that goes into words, sometimes I can understand them. But I don't know if they'd understand a question, or if when they answered I could understand them; and then, of course, You never know. Sometimes they just don't answer."

  "I was afraid of something like that," said Jim. "But I still can't believe they're seeing him, or smelling him. The sumpter horse might ignore him; but for Gorp to ignore another stallion—I wish I could look at what's there through their eyes."

  Of course, no sooner had he said it than he realized he could—or at least look at the horse through nonhuman eyes; and without risking using any of the magic inside his ward.

  He had used his dragon-vision often before now, to get a good look at objects in the distance; but, of course, a dragon was actually not an animal—but also, f
or that matter, neither a Natural nor a human. They were a breed apart. But maybe it was worth trying. He visualized himself with the eyesight of a dragon, and felt the bulging sensation below his forehead that went along with the enlarged eye structure. He looked at the scene by the tent.

  The black horse had not moved. No one had come out of the tent. There was no visible difference in the scene.

  He returned his eyesight to human. That was that, he thought—but then it occurred to him his dragon-changing ability offered another possibility of help. If he could see with dragon-sight, as he had just done, he could as well fly with dragon-wings—all without once cracking his ward.

  "Hob," he said, "if I changed to my dragon body, you could ride on me, couldn't you?"

  "Yes, my Lord."

  "Then, if I flew where you told me, could you show me from the air the way to where we can get out of this forest?"

  "Oh, certainly, my Lord. But I don't think we could get out even if we got to it."

  "Why not?"

  "Well…" Hob sounded embarrassed. "I tried myself, my Lord, when the smoke took me to it—and the way out disappeared. The smoke had to find it again, in the new place it'd gone to."

  "I see," said Jim grimly. A movable exit. Indeed, he told himself, he should have suspected that, himself. A brand-new Apprentice at magic should have.

  If there was supposed to be only one way out, then the resident magic in a place like this Forest Dedale would have means of preventing any escape by cheating. Hob's finding the exit had not been cheating because it was part of hobgoblin nature to be able to ride smoke; and smoke had a right to find its way to any exit because that was a natural attribute of smoke. But Jim's going around and over when an ordinary escapee would not be able to without encountering the dangers set up along the way, would be blocked.

  "—Besides, my Lord," Hob was saying, "aren't the horses too heavy for you to fly them anywhere?"

  Of course, that was true, too. True, and so obvious he should have thought of it before he spoke.