The Dragon and The George

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Good luck, boy!" said Smrgol in Jim's ear. "And Gorbash—"

  Something in the other's voice made Jim turn his head to look at him. The ferocious mouth-pit and enormous fangs were close to him, but behind them Jim read an unusual expression of affection and concern in the dark dragon-eyes.

  "Remember," Smrgol said, almost softly, "that you are a descendant of Ortosh and Agtval, and of Gleingul who slew the sea serpent on the tide banks of the Gray Sands. And be, therefore, valiant. But remember, too, you are my only living kin and the last of our line—and be careful!"

  The old dragon's voice stumbled and choked. It seemed to struggle for a fraction of a second before it went on.

  "And—er—good luck to you, too—er—James!"

  Then Smrgol's head was jerked away as he swung about to face Secoh and Bryagh, who came crashing to earth entangled together, almost on top of him. Jim, turning back toward the tower, had only time to take to the air himself before the rushing ogre was upon him.

  He had lifted on his wings without thinking, out of his dragon-instinct when attacked. He was aware of the ogre before him, halting now, its enormous gray feet digging deep into the ground. The rusty-banded club flashed before Jim's eyes and he felt a heavy blow high on his chest that swept him backward through the air.

  He flailed with his wings to regain balance. The oversize idiot face was grinning only a couple of yards from him. The club swept up for another blow. Panicked, Jim scrambled aside in midair, retreating, and saw the ogre sway forward a step. Again the club lashed out—quick! How could something so big and clumsy looking be so quick with its hands? Jim felt himself smashed out of the air down to the ground, and a lance of bright pain shot through his right shoulder. For a second a thick-skinned forearm loomed over him and his teeth met in it without thought.

  He was shaken like a rat by a terrier, and flung clear. His wings beat for the safety of altitude and he found himself about sixteen feet off the ground, staring down at the ogre, who grunted and shifted the club to strike upward. Jim cupped air with his wings, flung himself backward and avoided the blow. The club whistled through the unfeeling air; and, sweeping forward, Jim ripped with his teeth at one great shoulder before beating clear. The ogre turned to face him, still grinning. But now blood welled and trickled down where Jim's teeth had torn, high on the shoulder.

  Abruptly, Jim realized something.

  His panic was gone. He was no longer afraid. He hung in the air, just out of the ogre's reach, poised to take advantage of any opening; and a heat of energy, a sharpness of perception was coursing all through him. He was discovering that, with fights—as with a great many similar things—it was only the beforehand part that was bad. Once battle was joined, several million years of instinct took over and there was no time or thought for anything but confronting the enemy.

  So it was, now.

  The ogre moved in on him again and that was his last intellectualization of the fight; for everything else was lost in the moment-to-moment efforts to avoid being killed and, if possible, to kill, himself.

  It was a long, blurred time—about which, later, he had no clear memory. The sun marched up the long arc of the heavens and crossed the midday point and headed down again. On the torn, sandy soil of the causeway he and the ogre turned and feinted, smashed and struck at each other. Sometimes he was in the air, sometimes on the ground. Once he had the monster down on one knee, but could not press his advantage. At another time they had fought halfway up the slope to the tower and the ogre had pinned him in a cleft between two huge boulders. The club was hefted for the final blow that would smash Jim's skull. Then he had somehow wriggled free, between the very legs of his opponent; and the battle was on again.

  Now and then, throughout the fight, he would catch brief kaleidoscopic glimpses of the combats being waged about him: Brian, wrapped about by the blind body of the worm, its eye stalks now hacked away, and the knight striving in silence to draw free his sword and sword arm, which were pinned to his body by the worm's encircling form. Or there would roll briefly into Jim's vision a tangled, roaring tumble of flailing, leathery wings and serpentine bodies that was Smrgol, Bryagh, and the mere-dragon. Once or twice he had a momentary view of Carolinus, still standing erect, his staff upright in his hand, his long white beard flowing forward over his gown, like some old seer in the hour of Armageddon. Then the gross body of the ogre would blot out his vision and he would forget all but what was before him.

  The day faded. A mist pressed inward from the sea and fled in little wisps and tatters across the battlefield. Jim's body ached and his wings felt leaden. But the ever-grinning ogre and his sweeping club seemed neither to weaken nor to slow. Jim drew back in the air for a moment, to catch his breath; and in that second he heard a voice cry out.

  "Time is short!" it called, in cracked tones. "We are running out of time! The day is nearly gone!"

  It was the voice of Carolinus.

  Jim had never heard it raised before with such a desperate accent. Even as he identified it, he realized that it had sounded clearly to his ears—and that for some time now, upon the causeway, except for the ogre and himself there was silence.

  He had been driven back down from the slope to the area from which he had started. To one side of him, the snapped ends of Blanchard's bridle dangled limply from the earth-thrust spear to which Brian had tethered the horse before advancing against the worm. A little off from the spearshaft—from which the terrified horse had evidently broken free—stood Carolinus, leaning heavily on his staff, his old face shrunken, almost mummified in appearance, as if life had been all but drained from it.

  Jim turned back to see the ogre nearly upon him once more. The heavy club swung high, dark and enormous in the dying day. Jim felt in his limbs and wings a weakness that would not let him dodge in time; and with all his strength, he gathered himself and sprang instead up under the sweep of the monster's weapon and inside the grasp of those cannon-barrel-thick arms.

  The club glanced off Jim's spine and he felt the ogre's arms go around him, the double triad of bone-thick fingers searching for his neck. He was caught, but his rush had knocked the ogre off its feet.

  Together they rolled over and over, on the sandy earth, the ogre gnawing with his jagged teeth at Jim's chest and striving to break the spine or twist the neck, while Jim's tail lashed futilely about.

  As they rolled against the standing spear and snapped it in half, the ogre found his neck hold and commenced to twist Jim's neck as if it was a chicken's being wrung in slow motion.

  A wild despair flooded through Jim. He had been cautioned by Smrgol never to let the ogre get his arms around him. He had disregarded that advice and now was lost, the battle was lost. Stay away, Smrgol had warned, use your brains…

  But the wild hope of a long chance sprang suddenly to life in him. His head was twisted back over his shoulder and he could see only the darkening mist above him; but he stopped fighting the ogre and groped about with both forepaws. For a moment of eternity, he located nothing—and then something hard nudged his right foreclaw, a glint of bright metal flashed before his eyes. He gripped what he had touched, clamping down on it as firmly as his clumsy claws would allow—

  And, with every ounce of strength that was left to him, he drove the broken half of the snapped spear deep into the middle of the ogre, who now sprawled above him.

  The great body bucked and shuddered. A wild scream burst from the idiot mouth beside Jim's ear. The ogre let go, staggered back and up, and tottered to its feet, towering above Jim as the stone edifice itself towered above them both.

  Again, the ogre screamed, stumbling about like a drunken man, fumbling at the broken end of the spear that was sticking out of him. Jerking at the shaft, he screamed again; and lowering his unnatural head, bit at it like a wounded animal. It splintered in his teeth. He then screamed a final time and fell to his knees. Slowly, like a bad actor in an old-fashioned movie, he rolled over on his side and drew up his legs like someone
with a cramp. An ultimate scream was drowned in the bubbling in his throat; black blood trickled from his mouth. He lay still.

  Unsteadily, Jim crawled to his feet and looked about him.

  The mists were, oddly, drawing back from the causeway and the thin light of late afternoon stretched long across the bouldered slope, the tower above it and the small plain below. In the rusty light, Jim saw that the worm was dead, literally hacked in two. Aragh lay, grinning, a splint on his broken leg. Brian, in bloody, dented armor, leaned wearily on a twisted sword not more than a few feet from Carolinus. Dafydd was down, his shirt half torn off, the shape of a harpy sprawled motionless across his chest. Danielle stood above him, an arrow still notched to her own bow. As Jim watched her, she slowly lowered her weapon, cast it aside and dropped down beside the Welshman.

  A little further off, Secoh raised a bloody neck and head above the motionless, locked-together bodies of Smrgol and Bryagh. The mere-dragon stared dazedly at Jim. Jim moved painfully, over to him.

  Looking down at the two immense dragons, he saw that Smrgol lay with his jaws locked in Bryagh's throat. The neck of the younger dragon was broken.

  "Smrgol…" Jim croaked.

  "No…" gasped Secoh. "No good! He's gone… I led the other one to him. He got his grip—and then he never let go…" The mere-dragon burst into sobs and lowered his head.

  "They all fought well," creaked a strange, harsh voice.

  Jim turned and saw the knight standing at his shoulder. Brian's face was as white as sea foam below the now-helmetless tousled brown hair. The flesh of his features seemed fallen in to the bones, like the face of an old man. He swayed as he stood.

  "We have won," said Carolinus. "At a price!"

  He turned to Danielle. Jim and the knight turned with him. She was still beside Dafydd; but she had pulled the harpy from Dafydd's upper body, and the shreds of his shirt. Brian's helm, now filled with water from beside the causeway, was with her and she was gently sponging a red tear that ran from near the joining of Dafydd's neck and left shoulder to his middle ribs.

  Jim, the magician and the knight walked together to stand over the two of them. With his shirt off, Dafydd's upper body looked twice as large as it had, clothed. It was a sculptor's find of a chest: the shoulders lay back, square and incredibly broad of bone, and powerful muscle lay in cables across the bowman's lean torso from the pectorals to the abdominals, as if molded by an anatomist building a display model. But the body was limp now, and still.

  "Indeed," said Dafydd to Danielle, so faintly that, had it not been for the utter stillness now all about them, the three watchers would not have understood him, "you are wishing the impossible. As the Mage said, their bite is death, and I feel that death now in me."

  "No," said Danielle, sponging away at the ragged slash the harpy's teeth had made in him.

  "But it is so," Dafydd insisted, "though I wish it were not so, for that I love you. But to every bowman comes death, in time. I have always known this, and am content."

  "You are no longer merely a bowman." Danielle's voice was steady and composed. "I made you a knight and you are a knight; and as a knight, it's ungentlemanly of you to take leave without my permission. And I do not wish you to go. I will not let you go!"

  With a strength that startled Jim, for all that Brian had told him about how she pulled a hundred-pound warbow, Danielle lifted his upper body easily in her arms, laid his head against her shoulder and held him to her.

  "I have you," she said; and though her eyes were perfectly dry and her voice quite calm, almost businesslike, the sound of it wrung Jim's very guts, "and I'll never give you to anything else—even to death—unless you want to leave me. You have to tell me you want to leave me, or else you can't die."

  Dafydd smiled faintly.

  "Indeed…" he said; and in that moment after, in which he said nothing, Jim was ready to believe that the single, faintly breathed word had been his last.

  But the bowman spoke again.

  "Then it's true, that you really wish me to live. If so then death must come get me against my will, which I do not think it or any other thing can do, since never have I been forced against my will nor shall be now, look you."

  He closed his eyes, turned his head a little to rest against her breast and said nothing more. But his chest continued slowly to rise and fall steadily.

  "He'll live," Carolinus said to Danielle. "He asked no price for coming here, and not even the Auditing Department can ask a price of him, now that he's helped win this day."

  The girl did not answer the magician, but bowed her head above Dafydd's slowly moving chest and sat holding him as if she would sit there forever, if necessary. Jim, Brian and the magician turned back to Aragh, and to Secoh, who had conquered the explosion of his grief and now sat quietly above the body of Smrgol.

  "We have won," said Carolinus. "Not again in our lifetimes will this place gather strength enough to break out against the world."

  He turned to Jim.

  "And now, James," he said. You wanted to go home. The way is open."

  "Good," said Jim.

  "Home?" asked Brian. "Now?"

  "Now," said Carolinus. "He has wished from the beginning to return to his own place, Sir knight. Fear not, the dragon who's the original owner of this body James has been wearing will remember all that's happened here and be your friend."

  "Fear?" Brian somehow managed to dig up a spark of energy to spend on hauteur. "I fear no dragon, dammit! It's just that… I shall miss you, James!"

  Staring at Brian, Jim saw the knight's eyes unexpectedly brimming with tears. He had forgotten learning, in his studies of the European Middle Ages, that people cried then as naturally as they laughed; his own self-conscious twentieth-century self felt acute embarrassment at the sight.

  "Well, you know…" he muttered.

  "Well, well, James," said Brian, wiping his eyes on a trailing end of Geronde de Chaney's favor. "What must, must! In any case, in respect to the old boy here"—he nodded at the dead Smrgol—"I'm going to see what can be done about this dragon-human alliance business, so I'll be seeing a fair amount of whoever owns this body you've been in, and it'll be somewhat like having you around, in any case."

  "He was great!" burst out Secoh, staring at the body of the old dragon at his feet. "He made me strong—for the first time in my life. Anything he wanted, I'd do it!"

  "You come along with me, then, to vouch for the dragon end of things," said Brian. "Well, James. I suppose it's good-bye, then—"

  "Angie!" cried Jim, suddenly remembering. "Oh—excuse me, Brian. But I just remembered. I've got to go get her out of the tower."

  He spun around.

  "Wait!" said Carolinus.

  The magician turned to face the edifice itself; and raised his wand.

  "Deliver!" he cried. "You are vanquished. Deliver!"

  They waited.

  Nothing happened.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Carolinus struck his wand once more, endwise, upon the hard sand.

  "Deliver!" he cried.

  Once more they waited. The slow seconds stretched out into minutes.

  "By the Powers!" Suddenly, strength seemed to have flowed back into S. Carolinus. His voice was once more full and he looked to have grown six inches. "Are we to be flouted? Auditing Department!"

  Something happened then that Jim was never to forget. The memorability of it lay not in what happened, but in the quality of the event. Without warning, the whole earth spoke—the sea spoke—the sky spoke! And they all spoke with the same, single, bass voice that had responded from thin air to Carolinus before, when Jim was present. This time, however, nothing was apologetic or humorous about the voice.

  "DELIVER!" it said.

  Almost in the same second, something dark came swiftly out of the blackness of the arched, ground-level entrance to the tower. Drifting down the slope toward them, it seemed to float; but it arrived more quickly than its leisurely velocity indicated. It was a
mattress of intertwined fir boughs, the needles still fresh and green upon them; and on that mattress Angie lay, her eyes closed.

  The mattress reached them and settled to the ground at Jim's feet.

  "Angie!" he exclaimed, bending over her.

  For a moment a deep fear had stirred in him; but then he saw that she was breathing steadily and calmly, as if only sleeping. In fact, as he watched, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

  "Jim!" she said.

  Scrambling to her feet, she threw her arms around his scaly neck and hung on to him. Jim's heart did a flip-flop in his chest. His conscience ripped him like a bandsaw for not having thought of her more during the past days, for not having managed to come for her sooner.

  "Angie…" he murmured tenderly—and then something struck him. "Angie, how did you know it was me, and not some other dragon?"

  She let go and looked up at him, laughing.

  "Know it was you!" she exclaimed. "How could I miss, after all this time in your head—"

  She broke off suddenly and stared down at herself.

  "Oh, I'm back in my own body, again! That's better. That's much better!"

  "Head? Body?" Jim's mind wobbled between two incredible questions; and finally chose the one that sounded the more ominous. "Angie, whose body were you in?"

  "Yours, of course," she said. "That is, I was in your mind, which was in your body—or Gorbash's body, to be exact. At least, I was—unless I'm dreaming now. No, there they all are, just the way they should be: Brian, Dafydd, Danielle and the rest."