The Dragon on The Border

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The gown, like the ones worn generally in that fourteenth-century period by other women he had seen, was fitted down as far as the waist, and then flared out to become voluminous. About the only sign about it that his now more experienced eye could pick up was the fact that the seat area of the gown was shiny, which indicated that she was probably a regular, if not an addicted, horsewoman.

  The gown itself was of heavy wool, tightly knit. Clothes were bought and made in those days primarily to deal with the winter temperatures. You simply put up with being a little extra warm when summer came along. Moreover, in a castle like this, it was usually pretty icy inside, except at the very end of the summer; when the stone walls, floor and ceiling had had a chance to warm up.

  Her feet were enclosed in shoes that were hardly more than slippers. They greatly resembled the Mary Jane shoes that were made for little girls in Jim's own twentieth century; and fastened with a single buckle and a button, which seemed to be made of bone.

  The most remarkable thing about her, though, was the fairly wide leather belt that circled her slender waist, and had a number of keys dangling from it; as well as a number of other objects probably of household use, but which Jim at the moment could not identify. That belt could only mean that she was the chatelaine of the castle—in spite of her apparent youth she had been placed in the position of being hostess and, effectively, commanding officer over all the servants within the castle itself and its outbuildings, except the stable.

  Jim was impressed. That type of responsibility and that type of control required a strength of character and a firmness that seemed too much for the frail-looking girl in front of him. But she would not be wearing a leather chatelaine's belt unless she could perform the duties that went along with it.

  "Well now, Giles," she was saying, "are you going to ask me to sit down?"

  "Oh—yes. Yes, of course," growled Giles, "though I was hoping you would have been here right from the moment James and Brian came down."

  "You forget my duties nowadays," she answered, seating herself on the bench beside Jim and looking up at him. "Ever since Easter, I have been chatelaine by Father's command; and as long as I am within these castle walls, my duties leave me very little peace. There is always something in the kitchen, the wash house, or with the other servants generally, that calls for my attention and decision. That's why I'm so glad to get out on my mare and ride for a little while. But I'm here now—Sir James, I'm really so honored to make your acquaintance! I never dreamed of ever actually getting to meet someone who actually had slain an Ogre, almost like King Arthur. Indeed, there can be few folk who have."

  "Oh, well…" said Jim.

  It was a slightly awkward situation. Her comment called for some show of modesty; on the other hand even in Gorbash's dragon body it had been a murderous four- to five-hour fight, that had taken him to the very limits of his dragon strength. It would sound a little false to pretend it had been nothing important.

  She put her hand lightly on his nearest forearm.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to bring up the subject if it was painful to you for any reason."

  "It's not painful at all," answered Jim. "In fact, to be honest with you I'm rather proud of having done it. But there just isn't a great deal I can say about it—except that it was a hard fight."

  "I'm sure it was," she said. "And you turned into a dragon yourself right in that magician's castle to save your friends?"

  "Well, yes. I did," answered Jim, "but come to think of it, that wasn't part of what we all told your father and brothers last night—

  "Oh, I asked Giles a lot of questions about you!" She smiled mischievously and her whole face lit up. "He even told me about this fairy who lived in the lake who fell in love with you and followed you for leagues and leagues right up to the battlefield between the French and English. That must have caused you some problems."

  "Well," said Jim, "it wasn't so much her following me, it was a matter of getting away from her, once she had me underneath the lake. She had me convinced that the only reason I could go on breathing air was by staying where she had left me. But I was able to use a little magic of my own and get away. So it didn't amount to hardly anything after all."

  "Just think of what it would have been like for your wife," said Liseth, "if you'd been trapped under that lake forever. To say nothing of your friends who needed you to rescue the Prince."

  "So Giles told you about Angie?" Jim asked her.

  "Oh, yes," she said, smiling again. "I asked him that too."

  He had never really gotten over that business of being captured by the water Natural, Melusine, beautiful as she was. For one thing, Angie had never really believed that nothing had gone on between him and Melusine, while he was her prisoner on the bottom of the lake. But he had no intention of bringing that up now.

  "As a matter of fact," he said, "Sir Brian, here, and Dafydd, undoubtedly would have managed to rescue the Prince even if I hadn't been able to rejoin them."

  "I'm sure they would," she said. Her hand slipped from Jim's arm as she turned to Brian, seated on another bench on the far side of her but on the same side of the table. "And your wife must have worried about you too, Sir Brian," she said, "even though she'd be used to knowing a paladin like yourself could take care of himself."

  "Paladin, nonsense!" said Brian, putting down the beef bone from Jim's plate, on which he had been absently gnawing; and washing what was in his mouth down with a quick swallow of wine first. "All the credit goes to James and Dafydd. As for a wife, I have none—yet, at least. 1 am promised to my lady love, the Lady Geronde Isabel de Chancy; but we are waiting for her father to return from the Holy Land, to ask his permission for the wedding. It has been no short wait—nearly four years now."

  "What a shame," said Liseth. "But he should be coming home soon."

  "If he is still alive," said Brian.

  "That, too," she said a little somberly. "Here on the Border, we know the uncertainty of life, as well. We must plan for the years ahead, without ever being sure we will see them."

  The momentary somberness passed like a cloud from the face of the sun and she turned back to Jim.

  "Tell me, my Lord," she said, "how long do you think you'll be staying here at our poor Border castle?"

  Before Jim could answer, they were joined by someone else, a tall, slim figure in archer's jerkin, carrying his bow, unstrung and cased, and his quiver, with the weather cover buckled down over it.

  "And this is the last of my very good friends that I wanted you to meet," said Giles to Liseth as Dafydd reached the table, leaning his cased bow against it and putting his quiver on the table top. "This is Dafydd ap Hywel, the greatest of all archers in the world; he was with Brian at the Loathly Tower and with me in France!"

  Liseth jumped to her feet, went quickly around the table to the other side where Dafydd stood, and curtsied to him.

  "It is a marvelous pleasure to meet you, Master bowman," she said. "Pray, sit down."

  "And it is likewise a pleasure to meet you, indeed," said Dafydd, still standing. "Will you also sit, and may I perhaps pour you some of this wine I see here?"

  "Well—half a cup," said Liseth. "Thank you," she added as they both seated themselves. "Giles tells me that you are married also."

  "To a very lovely lady, who was formerly known as Danielle o'the Wold," said Dafydd. "We have one son now six months old."

  "Liseth," Giles interrupted them, "enough courtesy and of your duties as chatelaine. We must make some decisions here, at the table. Jim—what did you want to do today? I can take you fishing and there's some very large fish to be caught in the sea nearby here. It's good sport. Or we can go hunting, though we'll have to go probably some distance to find woods that have deer, or any game worthwhile—"

  "None of that," interrupted Jim, suddenly making up his mind. He would indeed investigate what was at work here. If the Dark Powers were indeed being busy against him, it would be madness just to sit on his
hands. "What I was thinking of doing, actually, was looking into the Hollow Men—"

  "Excellent idea!" said Brian. "We'll find much more sport doing that than we will in fishing or hunting."

  "Indeed I think it a very good idea also," spoke up Dafydd, who had just been served a plate of breakfast beef and bread. "I have been out this morning trying one of my arrows with some small changes in them; and I would look forward to an opportunity of trying it also on such targets, for which, as haps, I designed it."

  "And I must go with you!" cried Giles. "You'll need a guide. I'll have to get Father's agreement, of course—"

  "You must take me with you," interjected Liseth, almost softly but determinedly. "In fact you will need to, Giles, since I am the only one who may find out routes by which we may make our way to the Hollow Men."

  Giles's head snapped around and he stared at her.

  "Now, Liseth!" he said. "Father would never approve—"

  "I think he would," said Liseth.

  She was on her feet in the same instant in which she spoke.

  "I'll go ask him now," she went on, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  "It's true enough," said Giles gloomily. "She speaks to all the animals wild and tame, and knows more about the hills than all of us put together. And it's into the hills we must go in order to find the territory of the Hollow Men. Nor have I any great hope that Father will refuse to let her go. She has a way of getting what she wants from him.—Which reminds me, I was about to go and speak to Father, myself. As a knight and a grown man I don't need his permission; but this family survives by working together, like most Border families. He may not want me to be absent right now—though I doubt it. I'll be right back."

  "Wait a minute," said Jim. "Just a second. I hadn't planned on taking anyone. In fact, I was thinking of going alone. What I want to do is creep up on one of their encampments without being seen so that I can watch them and maybe listen to what they say."

  "Well, you'll not do it without me," said Brian. "What if you're discovered creeping up on them or listening to them? You'll need at least someone to ward your back if they come after you."

  "Indeed, that is true," said Dafydd. "Besides, as I started to say, but had no time to, I am eager to try out a new sort of arrow I have just cut. It is designed particularly to go against the Hollow Men, if sobeit that the opportunity occurs to use it. That opportunity will be much improved if I go along with you in your seeking of them."

  "And you can't seek them without a guide—either Liseth, or at least myself—to keep you from being lost in this area where you don't know your way," said Giles. "So that's settled. I'll be right back."

  He was gone, in fact, less than a few moments. Liseth returned with him, a smile on her face that announced the fact that she had also been allowed to go along with them. It occurred to Jim fleetingly to wonder why nobody had asked his permission to accompany him this way. However, it would really do no harm to have the others with him if he was going into strange territory and possibly likely to encounter dangerous characters.

  They took horses. Giles led them up and across some moorland and into an area of scattered trees and broken ground. This at last grew into a territory of miniature mountains and valleys, with streams rushing down the valleys.

  Something about it struck a chord in Jim; but he could not think what it was until their horses carried them laboriously up over one crest and he looked down into a narrow little valley in which something almost too small to be called a river, but too large to be called a stream, made its way along through an accompanying narrow forest of bulrushes.

  It was the bulrush—also known, Jim remembered idly from his botany, as the 'club brush'—that triggered the elusive bit of memory he was seeking. It was part of the poem by William Allingham, an early nineteenth-century poet. A poem called The Fairies, and one particular quatrain of it went:

  "Up the airy mountain down the rushy glen,

  we daren't go ahunting for fear of little men ..."

  Down below him was the rushy glen, and up where he was—though he was probably no more than a couple of hundred feet above the rushy glen—was the airy mountain.

  He found himself wondering what else William Allingham had written. Part of himself, he supposed, would always be an academic. It was seldom that he was nostalgic for the twentieth-century world he had left behind when he had come here to save Angie from the Dark Powers. But this present moment was one of them. If he was back home he could have run down William Allingham in the University library and read the rest of his poems. Had Allingham ever written anything to match the poem about the little men?

  "Wee folk, good folk,

  Marching all together,

  Blue jacket, red cap,

  And white owl's feather…"

  "Well, Liseth," Giles's voice interrupted his thoughts, "it's up to you now. Where do we look from here?"

  "Straight ahead," said Liseth happily. She was riding with all the aplomb of someone who normally lived on horseback in that form of saddle. She rode astride. The sidesaddle for women had not yet been invented. Her voluminous skirts covered her legs still, with propriety.

  "I've seen three rabbits so far, and they all hopped off in the same direction," she went on.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" asked Giles.

  "You'll see, Giles," she answered serenely.

  She took the lead and led them on along the top of the crest until they came to an incline splitting off from it that led them down toward the valley below. It was by no means a track or trail of any kind, merely a sort of slanting ledge that headed downward, wide enough for one horse at a time. But she went down there quite cheerfully, and the three fourteenth-century men with her naturally followed without the slightest apparent hesitation, although it looked as if the ledge might pinch out at any moment, or crumble beneath their horses' feet. Jim, bringing up the rear, would have preferred not to try to hide his own uncomfortableness with this sort of precarious descent; but the casually indifferent attitudes of the rest stopped him.

  Eventually the ledge brought them to the floor of the valley itself. There was a certain amount of solid ground outside the area of the rushes; and from among the tall stems and the club heads of the rushes was the steady murmur of the stream itself.

  "Are you sure you're going in the right direction?" Giles asked suspiciously of his sister.

  "Absolutely," she said, not even bothering to turn and look at him. "Just around that bend in the valley up ahead."

  They followed her and rode on, finally rounding the bend in the valley and—

  There they were.

  Jim's eyes opened as wide as they could. Right ahead of him he saw, in a group about fifty strong, not the Hollow Men at all; but the Little Men of Allingham's poem, just as the poem said, marching all together.

  They were marching directly toward Jim. It was true their clothes were not exactly as Allingham had described. They wore armor of metal plates on leather.

  Also, they carried a few things that the poem had not mentioned at all. To wit, short stabbing swords—almost Roman legionary-style weapons—at their belts; and all bore spears proportionate to their height; so that the spearheads clustered several feet above their regular ranks, some five across and ten deep.

  The Little Men themselves looked to be around four feet in height and their spears probably did not exceed seven feet at best. But they were very stout and businesslike-looking spears, with glittering metal points.

  Most of the Little Men wore bushy beards. But here and there among them Jim saw a clean-shaven face. With the beard missing, the typical face he saw was an almost heart-shaped one, coming down to a pointed chin, with bright blue eyes and a short, almost snub, nose. A nose that looked almost related to the delicate nose on Liseth, herself, so different it was from the hooked nose of Giles, and the slightly smaller one of Brian. Dafydd, of course, had the sort of impossibly narrow and straight nose that might be expected to go with the rest of
his handsome face, and reflected the finer boning of his Welsh heritage, for all his height and width of shoulder.

  Jim, himself, of course, had a perfectly ordinary nose, straight enough, but unremarkable otherwise; except for a slight crook in it that came from being broken in a volleyball game and the break never being surgically corrected.

  But, just as they had seen the Little Men advancing on them, the Little Men had seen them advancing. At first sight, the spears of the two first ranks had swung forward and down pointing directly ahead, so that they were facing something not too different from a line of the ancient Greek hoplites in phalanx formation.

  Then, evidently one of them either changed his mind or recognized Liseth, because there was a sharp command, and the spears swung up again. The whole marching group stopped abruptly, together, as neatly as a drill team. Led by Liseth, Jim and the others rode toward the front rank before them; and one of the Little Men in it, with a gray-flecked, gingery beard, stepped forward to meet her.

  "Liseth de Mer!" said the Little Man—and his voice was surprisingly bass-toned and authoritative.

  "All friends, Ardac, son of Lutel. My brother Giles, here, you know. Of these other three, all are close Companions of his, who saved his life when he was in France and killed, by bringing his body back for burial in the English Channel waters, from which he returned home. Just behind me—

  She turned her head to look at Jim. "Best dismount," she said.

  "You were leading us to the Little Men all the time!" Giles hissed at his sister as they dismounted.

  "Of course!" she whispered back. "Who more likely to know where Hollow Men are to be found?"

  Jim and the others swung down from their horses. More on a level with the Little Men, Jim was able to appreciate what a sturdy bunch they were. They might be short but their bones were thick and their bodies were compact. They were standing now with the butts of their spears resting on the ground; but still they presented a capable-looking appearance as warriors. Liseth was continuing her words to Ardac, son of Lutel.