The Dragon and The George

by Gordon R. Dickson

  But the watching was becoming more difficult.

  "Getting darker, isn't it?" Jim said, finally. "And misty."

  They had gone perhaps a mile and a half since they had crossed the line. And the sky had, indeed, been blackening. It was not a natural darkness, but a sort of thickening of the air, a premature night that seemed to be coming over them. With it came low clouds above their heads, and banks of mist, moving at water level off to either side of the causeway.

  Abruptly, Blanchard balked again. They stopped. But around them the noise of the sandmirks began to mount toward a frenzy of invisible movement. There was something triumphant about their mad activity. Unexpectedly, ahead and off the causeway to the right, rang out a single, heavy splash, like the sound of something large heaving itself out of water onto land. Aragh's nose lifted abruptly, and he growled, deep in his throat.

  "Now," he said.

  "Now what? What comes?" Brian demanded.

  "My meat," snarled Aragh. "Stand clear!"

  Stiff-legged, he walked a few paces forward from them and stood, tail hanging in a low arc, head a little down, jaws slightly open, waiting. His eyes burned red in the dimness.

  Now Jim's nose caught the scent of whatever it was Aragh had smelled. The odor was oddly familiar—and then he realized it was the same scent he had been picking up from the sandmirks, who had kept company with them. Only, this was stronger and far more rank. Now, too, his ears picked up the sound of something heavy-bodied approaching them from down the causeway—the sort of creature that would go through bushes rather than around them.

  Brian drew his sword. Aragh did not turn his head, but his ears flicked at the sound of metal sliding against metal.

  "My meat, I said," he repeated. "Stand back! Go when I say."

  Jim found his every muscle tensed, his eyes almost aching with the effort to see through the gloom to what was coming. Then, all at once it was visible, moving toward them: a great, black, four-legged shape, its close body hair still gleaming slickly from the waters it had just left. It made no effort to hide, but came on until it was less than three times its own body length from Aragh. Then it reared up and from its throat came a sick-sounding chuckle that was a deep-toned version of the same cluttering the three intruders here had heard earlier.

  "Apostles guard us!" Brian muttered. "Is that a sandmirk… ?"

  A sandmirk it was, but many times the size of the smaller creatures that had now three times awakened an ancient fear in Jim. This individual was at least as large as an adult grizzly bear; in fact, very nearly the size of one of the great Kodiak Island brown bears. Aragh, standing forward to challenge it, seemed in comparison to have shrunken from pony-size to the dimensions of a small dog.

  But the wolf showed no signs of backing off. From his throat came the steady, slow rumble of a growl, unvarying and continuing. For a long moment the monster sandmirk stood swaying a little on its hind legs, chuckling its bass chitter. Then it moved forward, yet upright—and suddenly the fight had begun.

  It was a flurry of action, too fast for human or dragon eye to follow in detail. For all its size, the great sandmirk could move its body and legs with vision-blurring speed. Only, Aragh was faster. He was in, out, around, up and down on the towering black figure, so swiftly and continuously that Jim's eyes gave up trying to follow his actions.

  As suddenly as they had come together, the two parted. Aragh stood back, head low, sounding his steady growl while the huge sandmirk panted, swaying on its heavy hind legs, its black coat marked here and there with lines of red.

  Aragh's growling now broke off, though his tense watching of his opponent did not relax an inch.

  "Go!" he said, without turning his head. "The others won't follow you as long as I hold their mother in play. And they won't mob me to help her, because they know that the first five to reach me will die; and none of them want to be among those."

  Jim hesitated. Brian spoke for both of them.

  "Sir wolf," he said, "we can't leave you to face these odds alone—"

  But before the last words were out of his mouth, battle had been joined again. Once more, the movement was too fast to follow; but this time it lasted longer—until a sudden, ugly, breaking sound rang out and Aragh leaped back to stand on three legs, his left foreleg dangling.

  "Go!" he snarled, furiously. "I told you—go!"

  "But your leg—" Jim began.

  "Did I ask your help?" Aragh's voice was thick with rage. "Did I ever ask help? When the she-bear caught me when I was a cub, alone and with three legs I killed her. I'll kill this Mother of sandmirks, again with three legs and alone! Go!"

  The monster now wore a bright pattern of red, bleeding slashes all over her body. But though she panted hoarsely, she did not seem weakened, or slowed. Nevertheless, Aragh's decision to fight alone was plainly not to be altered; and to throw away the wolf's deliberate sacrifice of himself was unthinkable. Certainly, if he was killed, it would only be a matter of time before the sandmirks would finish the other two.

  Brian looked at Jim.

  "Let's go," said Jim.

  The knight nodded. He tugged on the reins of Blanchard and led the horse forward. They moved off, as the wolf and the giant sandmirk matriarch closed in combat again behind them.

  The sounds of fighting behind them soon died in the distance. The darkness and the mist enclosed them. But Aragh had been right about one thing: none of the smaller sandmirks followed them. They plodded on; and for a long time neither of them spoke. Then Brian turned his head to Jim.

  "A very worthy wolf," he said, slowly.

  "If that big sandmirk kills him—" Jim began, and heard the sentence die in his mouth.

  He had been about to promise revenge upon the killer, and then it had come to him that he could do nothing. If the huge black creature should kill Aragh, there was no way he could find her again; and if he found her, there was no way he could destroy her before she and her legion of children killed him. He was not an English wolf, to ignore the effect of the chittering voices.

  It was bitter for Jim to face the fact that he was helpless to strike back against a cruel wrong. Intolerable. He had reached his present age never having cause to doubt that injustice must eventually be brought to book, and that any unfairness of life must, in the end, be balanced. Now he had to accept the debt of Aragh's possible self-sacrifice, knowing it might be something he could never pay back. Marching slowly along under the eerie and unnatural darkness that held the fenlands, he forgot for the moment where he was, and what might become of him, in the internal struggle of finding some way to live with that debt.

  It was hard to let go of cherished illusions; but he had no choice. Gradually, as he faced that fact, his convulsive grip on the belief that life must be fair, or else it could not be endured, relaxed; and he saw one more shackle upon the strength of his individual spirit fall away and sink into the waters of oblivion.

  "Getting darker, isn't it?" Brian's voice roused him from his thoughts.

  Jim looked around. They had gone perhaps a mile and a half since leaving Aragh and the sandmirks behind; and indeed the air had further thickened, even as the mists were closing in solidly on either sides of the causeway.

  "Much more of this," Jim said, "and we won't be able to go on."

  It was by now all but impossible to see any distance farther than the water's edge on either hand or for more than a dozen yards in front of them. They drew the cold viscousness of the air into their lungs, and it seemed to settle and pool there, stifling them. Walking had become even more of a labor as their wills sagged under the sense of depression which pressed without letup upon them. Nor was this all; for with the additional darkening had come a blanketing of sound. The noise of their footsteps and hoof-treads on the sandy soil was all but lost to their ears; and even their voices seemed to sound distant, thin and faraway.

  "Brian?" called Jim, groping through the gloom.

  "Here, James…" The dim outline of the armored knight mo
ved toward Jim and blundered against him, as they both came to a halt.

  "I can't see to go any farther," Jim said.

  "Nor I," Brian admitted. "We shall have to stay where we are, I suppose."

  "Yes…"

  They stood facing each other, but no longer able to make out the features of each other's faces; they were lost in an impenetrable darkness. And this darkness became even blacker, until any last intimation of light was gone and the obscurity was total. Jim felt chill, hard, iron fingers grip his left shoulder.

  "Let us hold together," said Brian. "Then, whatever comes on us, must come on us at the same time."

  "Yes," Jim agreed.

  They stood in silence and in lightlessness, waiting for they did not know what; and soon the blackness about them pressed further in on them, now that it had isolated them, and was nibbling at the very edges of their minds. Out of the nothingness came no material thing; but from within Jim crept up, one by one, like blind white slugs from some bottomless pit, all his inner fears and weaknesses, all the things of which he had ever been ashamed and striven to forget, all the maggots of his soul…

  He opened his mouth to speak to Brian—to say something, anything, to break the black spell upon him. But he found that already a poison had been at work within him. He no longer trusted the knight: for he knew that evil must be in Brian because of the evil he had rediscovered in himself. Slowly, stealthily, he began to withdraw from under the other's touch…

  "Look!" Brian's voice came suddenly to him, distant and strange, sounding like the voice of someone who has gone a long way off. "Look back the way we came!"

  Jim turned. How he knew the proper direction to look, in that nothingness, he was never able to tell. But he turned; and he saw, faraway—so very far away that it was like the glimmer of a star seen across uncounted light-years of space—a tiny, distant point of light.

  "What is it?" he gasped.

  "Don't know," replied the distorted, toy-like voice of the knight. "But it's coming this way. Look at it grow!"

  Slowly, very very slowly, the far-off light waxed and advanced. It was like a keyhole into daylight, enlarging as it came closer. The minutes ticked off, measured second by second in the beating of Jim's heart. Finally, the light stretched tall, lengthening as it came on like a knife slit cut through a cloth of darkness.

  "What is it?" cried Jim, again.

  "I don't know…" the knight repeated.

  But both of them felt the goodness of it, as it came. It was life and courage again; it was a power against the power of dark helplessness that had threatened to overwhelm them. They felt their strength returning as it came on, brightening; and Blanchard stirred beside them, stamping his hooves on the hard sand and whinnying.

  "This way!" called Jim.

  "This way!" shouted Brian.

  The light shot up suddenly in height, reaching for the heavens, as if activated by the sound of their voices. Like a great rod it advanced, upright, toward them, now broadening as it approached. The darkness was rolling back and lifting. The black was graying once more into a thick twilight, then the twilight thinning and dispersing. The scuffing sound of feet nearing them came to their ears, they heard a sound of slow breathing, and all at once—

  It was daylight again.

  And Carolinus stood before them dressed in his robes, a high-pointed hat on his head, holding erect before him—as if it was blade and buckler, spear and armor, all in one—a tall, carven staff of wood.

  "By the Powers!" he said, gazing at them. "I got to you in time!"

  Jim and the knight looked at each other like men snatched back from the brink of a cliff. Blanchard tossed his bridled head and stamped his feet again, as if to reassure himself that he was once more upon the solid earth of a world he knew.

  "Mage," said Brian, "my thanks!"

  "The fabric of Chance and History was stretched this time in your favor," said Carolinus. "Otherwise, I could never have reached you in time. Look!"

  He lifted the staff and drove it point-down into the sand at his feet. It went in, and stood upright like the denuded trunk of a tree. He gestured at the horizon and they looked around.

  The darkness was gone. The fens lay revealed, far and wide, stretching back the way they had come and, up ahead, going perhaps another half-mile to where they met the thin dark line of the sea. The causeway had also risen in altitude; until now, where they stood, they were perhaps twenty feet above the level of the surrounding landscape. Far ahead to the west, the sky was on fire with sunset. It lighted all the fens, the meres and the causeway with a red glow which lay bloodily on earth and grass and stunted trees; and it pooled just ahead, around a low hill, at a rise of a hundred feet or more above the seashore where, touched but uncolored by that same dying light there loomed over all, amongst great, tumbled boulders, the ruined, dark and shattered shell of a tower as black as jet.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  This much and little more they saw in the brief minute or so that the light lasted, for the sun was on the very lip of the sea horizon and went down as they watched. Night—true night, this time—came in from the east in one swift stride.

  Carolinus had been bending over something on the ground beside his staff. A little flame now leaped up beneath his hands; and going a little off to one side, he brought back some dry branches fallen from one of the causeway's dwarfed trees. He threw these on the flame, and a fire blazed up, lighting and warming them.

  "We're still within the circle of strength of the Loathly Tower," said the magician. "Stay within ten paces of the wand if you care to be sure of your own safety!"

  Tucking up his robe, he sat down cross-legged before the fire.

  "Lie down, Sir knight," he said, "and you, too, my enchanted friend. When that sun comes up again, you'll find you'll need all the rest you've been able to get."

  Brian obeyed willingly enough, but Jim sank reluctantly to the ground by the fire.

  "What about Angie?" he asked. "We haven't seen any sign of Bryagh. Do you suppose—?"

  "Your damsel's in the tower," Carolinus interrupted him,

  "In there?" Jim started up. "I've got to—"

  "Sit down! She's perfectly safe and comfortable, I promise you," said Carolinus, testily. "The forces in strife here don't center around her—not for the present, at least."

  He winced, and reached into his robes to produce a flask and a small cup made of cloudy glass. He poured white liquid from the flask into the cup and sipped it.

  "What the devil?" said Brian, staring.

  "How do you know?" Jim demanded of the magician. "How can you tell—?"

  "By the Powers!" snapped Carolinus. "I'm a Master of the Arts. How do I know? Forsooth!"

  "Pardon me," said Brian, his blue eyes staring. "Is that milk you're drinking, Mage?"

  "A bit of a sympathetic magic, Sir knight, for an ulcer-demon that's been plaguing me lately."

  "Tell me how!" Jim asked again.

  "I should think there'd be danger of it giving you a flux," said Brian, frowning. "Children, now…"

  "I will not tell you!" exploded Carolinus. "Did I spend sixty years to get my degree, only to be demanded an account of my methods at every turn? If I say Saturn is in the ascendant, Saturn is in the ascendant. And if I say the maiden is perfectly safe and comfortable, then the maiden is perfectly safe and comfortable. By the Powers!"

  He snorted indignantly to himself.

  "Listen to me, my young friend," he went on to Jim, draining his cup and tucking it with the flask back out of sight in his robes, "you may have a little kitchen knowledge of Art and Science, but don't let that give you delusions of understanding. You're here for a purpose, which comes into operation after sunrise tomorrow—just like this knight."

  "I, too, Mage?" inquired Brian.

  "Do you think you just happened to run into our mutual friend, here?" Carolinus asked. "You laymen always think of Chance as a random operative factor. Nonsense! The operations of Chance follow the mos
t rigid rules in the universe. Chance is invariably determined by the point of greatest stress between the other Prime Operators, such as History and Nature—particularly History and Nature, I might say, since as any fool knows, their particular strife makes changes in the pattern almost hourly. Otherwise, the universe would become so orderly we'd all die of sheer boredom. Listen to me, then—"

  He pointed a long, bony forefinger at Jim.

  "Nature is always at work to establish a balance of factors, which the operation of History is as unfailingly and continuously at work to disturb. The rub to all this lies in the fact that the new balance may always be established at more than one point, and it is in the determination of exactly which point that Chance—as a compensating element—enters the equation. This truth is the basis on which all magic, as a product of Art and Science, is constructed. Now do you understand the situation we have here?"

  "No," said Jim.

  "Oh, go to sleep!" cried Carolinus, throwing up his arms in exasperation.

  Jim blinked...

  ... And it was morning.

  He sat up in amazement and found himself yawning. On the other side of the staff—his wand, as Carolinus had called it—Brian was also sitting up with a look of surprise. Carolinus was already on his feet.

  "What happened?" asked Jim.

  "I sent you to sleep. What d'you think happened?" retorted Carolinus. He produced his flask and cup, poured himself some milk and drank it down, making a face. "I'm beginning to hate this stuff," he grumbled, putting the utensils back out of sight again. "Still, there's no doubt it's working. Come now!"

  He turned snappishly on Jim and Brian.

  "On your feet! The sun's been up for an hour and a half and our forces are strongest when the sun is in the ascendant—which means, we have our best chance of conquering before midday."

  "Why didn't you wake us up earlier, then?" asked Jim, getting to his feet as Brian also rose.

  "Because we had to wait for them to catch up with us."

  "Them? What them?" asked Jim. "Who's going to catch up with us?"

  "If I knew who, exactly," said Carolinus, gnawing on his beard, "I'd have said who. All I know is that the situation this morning implies that four more will join our party—Oh, so they're the ones!"