The Dragon on The Border

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Of spirits, no," said Jim. "But I would take as much caution as the next man or woman against meeting a force of the Hollow Men, armed and ready for trouble. Aside from that, as I say, I may wish to see some of these places."

  "All one to me!" said Snorrl, snapping at a fly that wandered by. "One Hollow Man or many. But Liseth, is it your wish that I take Sir James into the Cheviot Woods?"

  "It is very much so," said Liseth, with a slight note of reproach in her voice. "What Sir James says to you, all of what he says to you, is with my approval and support."

  Snorrl's ears, which had begun to rise, flattened back again. He turned to Jim.

  "When do you want to go?" he asked. "Now?"

  "No, not right now," said Jim. "For one thing, the day's light is almost gone and I would not have time to look them all over properly. Tomorrow, shortly after sunrise, might be a better time. But first, in any case—you said that there were more than one such place as I described. I would like to look at, say, the three of them which most closely fit my needs. Let me tell you more specifically what I would like."

  "As you wish," said Snorrl.

  "The ideal sort of place I have in mind," said Jim, "would hold all the Hollow Men—which I'm guessing at around two thousand in number. Possibly, because some of them would be only partially dressed, and therefore not in their full bodies, they could crowd into a smaller space than two thousand armed and armored men might. On the other hand, it would be safer to plan on as much space as could hold two thousand men easily, with a little open space left over."

  "Go on," said Snorrl, as Jim paused, looking at the wolf to see if the other followed.

  "—An open, preferably flat space, then," said Jim. "On at least one side of this—preferably on two, but not more sides—I would like there to be vertical cliffs, rock walls that are not easy for men in armor to climb. So that if the Hollow Men are attacked there from the two open sides, they will have no means of escape, but must stand and fight until the last one dies. These two open sides, then, should either slope down and away, so the forces that might attack the Hollow Men will be hidden; and preferably, in addition, be thickly wooded so the attackers can conceal themselves until they are close upon the gathering."

  Snorrl's ears had come up and his head raised interestedly as Jim spoke.

  "Sir James," he said, "it sounds greatly to me as if you actually plan such an attack."

  "Put it," said Jim, "that I'm hoping for such an attack. The question I have for you is which three of these sites most closely fit those requirements—or are there none that do? Tell me, if you will, the advantages and disadvantages of those that you think do fit. Then tomorrow I'll go with you to look at each one in turn."

  "I know three such you might consider," said Snorrl harshly. "Excellent traps for those two-legs-without-bodies. However, all three lie at some distance from here, and the closest is perhaps twenty miles, as you and those like you reckon distance. If you come tomorrow, I will wait for you by the first of them."

  He turned to look at Liseth and speak to her.

  "That grouse-killer of yours can find me from the air," he said to Liseth, "and then show Sir James the way there."

  "It would be hardly easy for Greywings to first find you, then come back, then lead Jim to you," objected Liseth. "Cannot you meet Sir James here and lead him all the way to the first place yourself?"

  "No, for two reasons," said Snorrl. "In the first place, why should I make a round trip of forty miles or more that I do not have to make? Secondly, by the time I'd met him here at sunrise and led him to the first place, enough of the day would be gone so that it would be a question whether we could look at both it and the two others before sunset. Then he would have his way to make back in the dark."

  Snorrl grinned.

  "I would not advise that," he said, "particularly since we will be in Hollow Men territory all the time."

  He turned to Jim.

  "Have you any better suggestion, Sir Knight?"

  "As a matter of fact, I have," said Jim. "Wait at the first place as you said, and I, together with Greywings, will find you."

  "Find me?" echoed Snorrl. "It would take you a week of days to find me, if not more."

  "I don't think so," said Jim. "You've forgotten I'm a magician. I have my own ways of getting there with Greywings, and I think we can do it fairly quickly."

  "Very well," said Snorrl. "I will wait for you at the first location until the sun is directly overhead. Then, if you've not come I'll be about my own business. I have no time to spend sunning myself all day for your purposes."

  "It's settled, then," said Jim. He looked at the sky, which was showing definite streaks of red from the west. "We should be getting back to the castle, m'Lady. I hope this good weather holds for tomorrow too."

  "It will," said Snorrl. He looked once more at Liseth. "If you need me, I'm always here, Liseth," he said.

  "Do me one thing, Snorrl," said Liseth. "Take good care of Sir James. Please!"

  Snorrl glanced at Jim.

  "For your sake, Liseth," he said, "yes, he shall be safe as far as I can make him. I promise."

  Almost as if he possessed magic of his own, Snorrl was suddenly gone. Liseth and Jim walked back to their horses, mounted them and headed back to the castle.

  "Sir James," said Liseth, almost timidly, once they were headed homeward, "how do you plan to go with Greywings and find Snorrl as you said?"

  "I have certain magic," Jim said. "If you forgive me, I'd rather not tell you about it, now."

  He looked around at the already darkening woods. "Also, I'm never sure in conditions like this who might be listening."

  "I take your meaning," said Liseth, "as far as your last words are concerned."

  She shuddered.

  So they returned to the castle together, in silence. Jim found himself feeling a little guilty at not being completely open with Liseth; but he reminded himself of how much he said to these people of another time was capable of misinterpretation and speculation.

  There was no specific necessity for hiding the magical acts he had the ability to perform. But performing them might set off a train of thought or action on the part of those witnessing, which might prove to have consequences he could end up regretting having put in motion.

  Accordingly, he joined the others for the evening meal, paid a couple of visits to Brian before bedtime; and found him asleep both times, but with a fair amount of the small beer drunk. Finally, Jim rolled himself up in his own mattress not far from Brian's bed, at a fairly early evening hour, since he looked forward to rising with or before daylight. He also left enough floor space for Dafydd, who was considerately yielding all the bed to Brian at the moment.

  It was, indeed, before daylight when he woke. He had become enough of a fourteenth-century person to wake—most of the time—when he needed to. In this case, what he needed was to rise enough before sunrise to dress, eat and drink something, pack some more food and drink to take with him, and ride out from the castle.

  He would have preferred to have left the castle on foot; but that would have attracted all kinds of attention. Knights did not go anywhere out of doors on foot when they could travel on horseback, any more than the cowboys of the western plains—those same who had trained their horses to stand "ground-hitched" if the reins were dropped to the ground—had walked when they could ride.

  About half a mile from the castle, he got off and tethered his horse on a fairly long tether to a face of rock. It was only about twenty feet high, but vertical; and held a little niche into which the horse could back to face any predator that came at it. It was the most he could do for it; and it was for that reason that, with a somewhat guilty feeling, he had borrowed one of the de Mer horses from the stable; rather than riding out on his own war horse, who was too valuable to risk by leaving staked out all day like this.

  He patted the horse on the neck by way of apology for leaving it alone like this and took the food and flask of drink he ha
d packed. He carried these off until he was out of sight of the horse among the trees. Experience had taught him that horses did not take kindly to his turning into a dragon before their eyes.

  A horse, quite clearly, did not bother to ask itself how a human could become a dragon. It concentrated merely on the most important fact—which was that there was suddenly now a dragon, complete with very large jaws and claws, in its immediate vicinity; and usually went wild with panic.

  Once safely out of sight, he laid down his food and flask, then disrobed completely and rolled his clothing up, including his boots. After a moment's thought he added his sword, in its scabbard.

  He tied clothes and food and weapons to his belt, looped the belt around his neck with the weight of the sword and scabbard behind, across his shoulders; fastening the belt, finally, with the tang of its buckle in the last hole. Then he wrote on the blackboard on the inside of his forehead:

  ME→DRAGON

  He felt, as usual, no perceptible sense of change, except that the package of weapons, food and drink seemed to move upward on his back as his neck became very much thicker.

  Looking down at his former arms and legs, however, he saw that they had become the forelegs and the very strong hind legs of a dragon. And he could feel the weight of the wings on his shoulders, together with the tremendous muscles there that he needed for flying purposes. The bundle he had made up now seemed to be holding firmly between a couple of the row of triangular bones that ran along the outside of his spine.

  He had slipped a note under the door of Liseth's room before leaving the castle, with clearly printed letters and simple words, telling her to give Greywings orders to show him the way to Snorrl; and explaining that he would be in the air in the form of a dragon.

  He stretched his wings, feeling an actual pleasure in the latent power of those mighty wing muscles; and, with a leap, sprang into the air and began swiftly climbing upward.

  It was dragon practice, even dragon instinct, he had discovered long since, to climb to at least a thousand or so feet, before starting to search for a thermal—in other words, an updraft of air from the surface below.

  On such an updraft he could glide, making a circle with rigid out-swept wings, and without the effort of personally powering his heavy body through the air. Even with his great wings and massive wing muscles, straight flying was a tremendous task. He reached his height and searched the sky for Greywings. But there was no sight or sign of the falcon anywhere under that gradually brightening dome of pink whiteness that was the early day seen from this altitude.

  It was difficult craning his neck to turn his head enough to see behind him, so he gave it up. The castle was dwindling in the distance back there. He had not found a thermal, and had instinctively gone into a glide which at a shallow angle was taking him back to the earth below. He pumped his wings again vigorously, climbing another five hundred feet or so, and thought he caught a glimpse of a speck in the sky that might be Greywings, before he went back into a glide again back toward the earth, still not having found the thermal he needed.

  He was beginning to wonder a little bit at the difficulty at finding one of these updrafts. At dawn like this, with the sun hitting the night-cold ground, thermals should be beginning, at least; although such things as patches of woods and so forth might not yet have begun to set up a steady upward flow of warmed air from the reflected sunlight.

  He had already lost what altitude he had recently gained and some more besides. Once more, a little angrily, he pumped his wings and climbed a good eight hundred feet in addition. Once more, he went into a shallow glide; and was just beginning to think that he had felt a thermal—though a small one, one too small to be of any use to a flier his size—when there was the harsh cry of a falcon in his ear and something dealt a stunning blow to the back of his head.

  He shook his head, more out of habit than anything else. His dragon skull was quite thick enough not to be bothered much by a blow that in his human body possibly could have made him unconscious—as, clearly, the clawed knuckles of the falcon, both feet bunched together, had struck him at the end of a dive from the peregrine's obviously superior height.

  Nor did he have to be Liseth to interpret what that angry shout of a falcon's had been. Roughly translated, it had meant, plainly enough:

  "Stop this damn bobbing around and start flying in sensible fashion!"

  It had occurred to him that if the falcon was to keep diving on him like that, however, he might have to do something about it. Possibly he might roll over on his back in mid-air, so as to catch the bird in his foreclaws, if not—lightly—in his jaws; to teach her that, she would just have to put up with the fact that dragons had different problems from falcons in moving through the air. But at that moment he finally found his thermal; and with relief went into a soaring circle, spiraling up a strong updraft away from the earth below.

  He looked around for Greywings, half expecting another blow on the back of the head, and was abruptly relieved to see that the falcon was now circling on the same thermal at a hundred feet above him. Soaring was one thing they had in common. Even the peregrine could not fly steadily all the time, in spite of the fact of being able to dive on a prey at close to two hundred miles an hour.

  As he watched, Greywings broke out of the thermal, headed west, with the rising sun behind them, found another thermal and began circling again. Jim followed. Clearly their search was now beginning; and they were beginning to work as a team.

  He had needed to remind himself that Greywings, no more than himself, knew where Snorrl would be. But the falcon was headed into the heart of the Cheviot Hills, or rather just above the heart of the Cheviot Hills, and that was the direction where they were most likely to find Snorrl.

  Jim looked over the terrain below with his own, dragon's, telescopic gaze. He could not see any place such as he had described to Snorrl within view, nor any sign of the wolf himself. He knew, however, that the falcon probably had much better vision than he did; and was that much more likely to spot the wolf first.

  He simply concentrated on following.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They spent a couple of hours soaring, from thermal to thermal, with short flights in between. The peregrine evidently liked to pick a post of observation above fifteen hundred feet; and Jim in his dragon body tried to take the same altitude, until he found that Greywings was uncomfortable unless she was at least a hundred or more feet above him.

  He therefore made things easier for her by keeping his own altitude around the thousand-foot mark and letting her pick her own post above that. From her higher altitude, of course, she was able to observe more distance. Jim soared along underneath her, trying to remember what the advantages and limitations of sight were for a bird like her.

  He assumed that she could not see in color, as his dragon's eyes could. The dragon's vision evidently was almost an exact duplicate of the human range, and saw colors pretty much the way human beings do. He knew it had been assumed that most animals saw only in black and white, and it had only been recently before he and Angie had left the world of their birth to come here inadvertently, that it had been discovered that wolves, and therefore possibly and presumably dogs, saw at least two other colors, one of them being red. He could not remember what the other color was.

  He was disturbed at this point, by a memory about which he was doubtful. It seemed to him that he remembered falcons, such as the peregrine—and for all he knew, all the class of hunting bird known as hawks, as separate from those known as falcons—also would miss seeing anything on the ground that stayed perfectly still—that their eyes were attracted by movement. If that was the case and Snorrl, waiting for them at the first of the possible locations that Jim was to look at, was lying down or not otherwise moving, Greywing's vision might pass right over him.

  Jim, worried, began to concentrate more strongly on searching the ground below himself.

  However, whether Snorrl had happened to move just as the falcon
was looking at him, or whether Jim's memory was playing tricks on him, it was only about half an hour later that Greywings began to descend on a spiral, and Jim, following her down on his own updraft, saw they were approaching a place in the woods below that was evidently a little higher than the rest of the landscape around it.

  It was backed by rocks, or cliffs rather, as he had specified, and the space seemed ample. But only one of the opened sides was treed; the other was a vertical cliff down to a stream for perhaps a hundred feet below.

  This would not do. However, it was plain to Jim that if he turned up his nose immediately at the first spot Snorrl had found him, the wolf might become annoyed and refuse to show him any more. He therefore landed, which Greywings did not, only some fifty feet or so from where Snorrl was lying peacefully on his side.

  Snorrl was instantly on his feet, standing sideways to Jim, his other flank facing the treed slope and poised, with one foot partially raised to take his body weight off it, with only the toe tip touching the ground.

  It was almost the same pose Jim had seen in a photograph, that a psychologist and wolf authority friend of his had described as being in a "classical fight or flight stance"; in other words, the wolf had his body balanced ready to do either.

  Jim hastily wrote the magical formula on the inside of his skull and reverted to his naked human form with the bundle and sword hanging down his back.

  For a moment longer, Snorrl held his pose. Then circuitously and cautiously he approached Jim, still with his body balanced in such a position so that he could run at a moment's notice.

  "It's all right, Snorrl!" called Jim. "It's just me. Sir James. I had to turn myself into a dragon in order to fly so I could cover the ground to get here along with Greywings."

  He now noticed that Greywings had settled down on the branch of a nearby tree. But she too looked uneasy with the situation, and ready to take the air again in an instant.

  Snorrl did not answer, although he circled a little closer. Jim, aware of the other's cautionary instincts, stood still and let Snorrl do the approaching. Finally, at last the wolf came up to him just barely to the point where by stretching his neck to its greatest extent he could sniff directly at the naked flesh of Jim's thigh. He did this, inhaling deeply for several sniffs, then apparently relaxed. He was still obviously out of humor.