by Thomas Head
By keeping just to its rear, where the drake could not see, I managed to chop at its leg, gravely wounding the enormous, clawed foot. It bellowed fire again and began swerving alternately from side to side as the enraged elves struck forward, their trained horses avoiding the side thrusts.
The saddle-girths of one hunter, though, gave way as he was leaning over to send an arrow into the brute’s head. Down he went, shoulders foremost under its nose. The horse, with a deft leap, cleared the vicious drive of horns. The beast did not see where its rider fell and galloped onward. Two more were mowed down like felled trees.
We plunged on and on, pursuing the racing drake while the ground shook under its clawed feet and our stampeding hoofs.
I had forgotten time, place, and even the danger of it—everything in the mad chase was just noise and fire. Still, I managed another blow to its leg. My horse was blowing, almost spent. But again, I dug the spurs into him, and was only a few lengths behind the drake again when the wily beast turned. With its head down, eyes narrowing and nostrils leaking fire, it bore down, straight at me.
My horse reared, then sprang aside.
Leaning over to take sure aim, I swung, but a side jerk unbalanced me. I lost my stirrup and sprawled in the dust. When I got to my feet, the creature was rolling up like a snake, spewing fire in every direction. My best ax was lost, but it was now protruding from the drake’s head. My horse was trotting away on three legs. Hunters were still tearing after the languishing nerve-fueled drake as it rolled, snake-like and ominous, swollen with anger.
Riderless horses, mad with the smell of blood and snorting at every flash of fire, kept circling the dying creature. Jickie, Frobhur, Kenzo, Delthal and Halvgar had evidently been left in the rear. They roared and chopped at the beast as they caught up with it.
I looked everywhere for Gilli and could not see him.
Near me, two elves were righting their saddles. I was tightening the girths on a loose horse, which was not an easy matter.
Suddenly, there was the whistle of something through the air overhead, like a catapult stone. The same instant, one of elves gave an upward toss of both arms with a piercing shriek. The fellow clasped at his throat, though his head had already fallen to the ground. .
I heard his terrified companion shout, “The mother! The mother!”
Then he fled in a panic, not knowing where he was going and staggering as he ran. Suddenly, I saw him pitch forward, face downwards. I had barely realized what had happened and what it all meant, before an enormous roar broke from the high grass above the embankment. At that my horse gave a plunge, and wrenching the rein from my grasp, galloped off, leaving me to face the creature. Half a score of elves scrambled down the cliff, and as I looked up, I saw it.
The “mother” of the beast, no doubt a different species altogether, was circling back, flying away south.
But there was something else, a sight almost as dreadful. It was the living body of the Dead King I had seen before, now in scarlet armor.
Only this time, it was no ghost. His flesh was rotten, and he rode a horse the color of blood. This thing was the body of the ghost I had seen —or else something had possessed or reanimated his corpse. I was looking hopelessly about for some place to hide from it when it circled out and appeared not a hundred yards away. Brandishing both a battle-axe and a mace, he came towards me at a furious speed, without even gripping the horse’s reigns.
I crouched, gripping the lesser of my swords as his horse approached. And the fool mistook my action for fear, charging ever faster.
White teeth glistened, and he shrieked with the hideous scream of a devil. I knew that sound. My mother had made it once. Back came memory of her hearing her giving birth to my younger brother. But there was certainly no time to dwell on the thought—the demon before me swung his battle-axe aloft. I dodged abreast of his horse to avoid the blow.
With a jerk, he pulled the animal back on its haunches. When it rose, I sent a spear to its heart. It lurched sideways, then reared again, straight up, and fell backwards with the demon under it. The fall knocked the battle-axe and the mace club from his grasp. As his horse rolled over in a final spasm, we were instantly locked in a death clutch. The evil eyes of the demon glared with a fixed look of pure hatred, and my hands tightened on the dead flesh of the throat. The demon was snatching at a knife in his belt when the cries of my fellows rang out, close at hand.
Their coming seemed to renew my strength. With my full weight hanging from his neck, the willowy form squirmed first on its knees, then to its feet. But my fellows dashed up, knocked its feet from under him.
Uncle Jickie, with blood lust on his face, axed off its head with a single blow.
I looked up, panting.
The mother dragon, the thunderwyrm herself, had disappeared from the sky, far to the south. Smoke was rising from the grass still. Some of the elves were gawking at the headless demon, while others were heading back to camp for carts with which to bring back the meat, sinew, bones and skin of the dragon.
“Mage-guard,” one of the elves cried. They spoke the words in Dwarvish, though in their heavy elvish accent.
Mage-guard?
The rest of the elves were working to put out the fires that the dragon’s breath had started.
“Where the devil is Gilli?” I asked.
Chapter 21
Mounting the horses, we rode up to the level prairie. We whipped our horses to a gallop, knowing that Gilli must have fallen from his steed.
Against the northern horizon shone a blaze of orange. The gathering smoke was obscuring our view, but we dashed back along the flattened trail of the dead beast, spurring our hard-ridden horses without mercy.
Each elf gave his horse the bit. Beating them over the head, they craned flat over the horses’ necks to lessen resistance to the air. A boisterous wind was fanning the burning grass now. Great tides of fire rolled upward with forked tongues. Before long, cinders rained on us like liquid fire, scorching and maddening our horses. But we never paused. The billowy clouds of smoke that rolled to meet us were blinding, and the very atmosphere, quivering with heat, seemed to become a fiery fluid that enveloped and tortured us. My hand was across my mouth to shut out the hot burning air. Our beasts whinnied pitiful screams and became wild with fear.
Still we did not slow.
We tied strips torn from our clothing across our mouths and beat the frantic creatures forward. The fire wave was crackling and licking up everything within a few paces of us. The flames were not crawling in one insidious line, but the very heat of the air generated red waves and pillars, which came forward in leaps and bounds, as if racing each other, reaching out cloven fangs that hissed at us like an army of serpents.
With the instinctive cry to heaven for help, I looked above. There was only a dome of glowing clouds, rolling, heaving and tossing. It made a body want to get on the ground and bury themselves, but I knew at that point we must choose one of two things, dash through the flames—or roast.
We all paused, the elves included. Some of them were huddling so close I felt the burn of their hot stirrups against both ankles. Our clothing was smoking in a dozen places.
Suddenly, there was a lull of the wind.
Uncle Jickie cried out through his muffle, “The calm before the end, my lads. The next burst of wind and we’ll cooked to perfection for the damned wolves.”
But in the momentary lull, a place appeared through the trough of smoke. The grass was green and the fire-barrier breached.
“They’ll have to settle on eating us undercooked, uncle. Follow me!”
With a shout, we dashed heads down towards the green grass. Our horses vaulted across the flaming wall, snorting and screaming with pain as we landed on the smoking turf of the other side.
I gulped a great breath of the fresh air into my suffocating lungs. As I tore the covering from my mouth, we raced on until we had cleared the flames.
Looking back I saw a horse sinking on the blackened
patch, an elf atop it. Both were screaming, aflame. There was a whiff of singed hair, and I understood that if Gilli had somehow survived the blitz on the dragon, the flames now had him.
Chapter 22
“The great madness of life is not in its length.”
—Dwarven saying
It was unusually cold when we brought our horses back away from the flames. We all stood and bundled ourselves against a patina of spring rain, which began to fall sideways out of the white sky.
Our old friend was gone, and the fire that had taken him was just a black scar on the grassland. We looked at one another, each red-faced from the flames and each one’s hair in singed gnarls.
Then Mighty Kenzo snorted, crying.
Twisting away with our thirsty horses, hunkering, we paused before the lip of a small stream that bore through the grass as if burrowing. We shared a moment, hands on shoulders, and trudged down into the spongy creek until we crested its rocky ledge. Bent and low in a surprising cold breeze, we stood staring down into the water as the horses drank.
“Where he is now, they’re celebrating his return,” I whispered.
My uncle smiled.
Knowing they needed time, I decided to go gather the packhorses and supplies.
Chapter 23
The path the beast had left curled north, falling away to blackened, bald earth. Gilli’s burnt frame was not far off, maybe two miles.
I could see eternity in his smile. His hearty face was broken against the rock that had killed him. Beyond that, the sullen murk of the wide, grim marsh flattened, butting up against the forested hillside where we had hid ourselves upon first seeing the drake.
I again looked at Gilli, wincing this time at his flame-cracked skin. From the small grove of trees past the marsh spilled the mournful wails of the elves. The strange noise was rising and falling out of tune with the wind. There was something happy and tiresome about it at the same time, something that let me know that the people singing it felt something of our pain. The wind blew the grass around my horse’s hooves as it whinnied, as if in mourning. Then I once more smelled the unpleasant stink of burnt flesh on the wind, and I heard the bittersweet clamor of the elves’ wailing cease.
I smiled, wishing Gilli farewell.
With quick, thirsty carelessness I went about burying him. Then, without words, I nodded.
I turned to find that our pack horses had already been strung together. A pair of thin gray figures stood outside the trees, staring at me.
It was the chief and his dwarven shaman. There was an odd stillness in their silence. And there was something lonely and menacing in their frozen, small eyes, that contrasted the eager horses behind them. I shivered and thought to nod, but instead rode to them wordlessly. I gathered our supplies, and left before they told us we were no longer welcome there.
* * *
It was a shock to see the fellows ready to travel on so soon. Such hardiness, I thought. It was amazing. It could only have come with the hardships the Wild Wars had blunted them to, or perhaps it was solely because this place reminded them of Gilli.
In either case, Halvgar spat. He pulled some silver pennies from his shirt and threw them over his shoulder.
“For ye whores and beer, Master Gilli!”
Chapter 24
So we rode out, making our way south as hurriedly as possible. There was, to my surprise, often an unexpected happiness in our conversations. In my youth, it was oftentimes amazing to me what the dwarven heart can endure. Frankly it was still a stunning thing to see in person. The way they laughed and cajoled when talking about Gilli, it was as if he’d been dead for years, and someone had brought his name in conversation. But there was a part of me all through the week-long trek across those grasslands that began to see the wisdom of this. Poets and bards often compare sorrow or grief to a heavy heart, and anyone who has been amidst unfriendly enemies knows the danger of this.
Suddenly, a shocked silence rippled through our party as we once again met with rolling hills. My uncle made a motion with his hand for us to stop.
We had reached the Fell-Riding. It was unnerving, both the change in the landscape and the change in my fellows. Each dwarf, stout as stone, sat atop their mounts at the last of the grasses, and looked without words into the vast and stony way before us.
Mighty Kenzo harrumphed. “The elves that first guided us here would not go in this place.”
“Aye,” Frobhur agreed. “But it cost us a month to go around.”
Blue and cold, the wrinkled landscape was sharp with loose and flaky shale. It was oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew gray by degrees, the rocky earth undulated away to the south like a glacier made of steel and rock. Ever widening, it was consumed by the dreamscape of that bleak night that fell on us. The difference in the land and the fellows was so stark that neither seemed like the ones I had known before. It was like something from a bedtime story, or going to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a home for goblins or trolls. And it seemed this place could easily house either…
We were not far from old Thunderwyrm’s Lair, either, maybe a week. There was just six or seven days left to see if all the trek and trouble had been just for the recovery of their corpses, or to make corpses out of our hearty bodies.
“We know what we need to do, my Cutters,” Frobhur said glumly, at which he dismounted and unburdened his pack horse of its dwindling load.
“Here, here indeed, Master Frobhur,” said Uncle Jickie. “Hooves won’t do! They’ll prove the death of us on this slippery shit!”
* * *
On foot now, our backs laden with gear, food, and weapons, we meandered cautiously downs into the stony hills before us. The blue-gray land was already a nightmare of knolls and pits, and here it seemed the horizon closed around us.
As we labored down the first slope, our movements in the dark were hunkered and slow. The blanket of cloud was thinning, and the night sky swept itself clean to offer a better view of the hellish terrain before us. We padded quickly together down through a long finger of forest that reached up almost to the grassy slopes. To travel the hillsides in these reaches, one would do better to have walked for days beforehand. The plunging, loose stone was already taxing the strength in my legs.
I must confess, though, that after so much riding, I found walking oddly pleasurable. It was always strange to me how much less tiring it is than riding.
But I was far from comfortable. Fortunately, I was not alone. By morning, we had to stop. Under the fabric of low clouds, we halted. There was a thin grove of cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops. The water falling wildly past our feet, we edged alongside a cool blue wall of rock, and we drank.
We were each exhausted, and as a vigorous rain began to fall, I heard snoring.
I turned to find every one of my little fellows asleep, sitting up.
* * *
As the morning passed away to a cold, dim afternoon, I let the lads continue to sleep. I cooked them a breakfast of our last smoked sausages, surprised to find that Halvgar had woken up to help me.
“Fie, old boy. You should rest. This land…” he said. “This land, it… it has a toll.”
“Halvgar my old friend, a wise old dwarf once advised on the day of his wedding that for everything there is cost.”
“Yes,” he conceded with a small grunt of a laugh. “Words slip out easier under the pleasant sunshine of home.”
He grunted again, but this time it was a sadder sound.
“Do you know that ol’ Frobhur, Jick, Gill, Kenzo and myself were in a company of fifty when we left out from Goback.”
I cocked an eyebrow. My uncle never mentioned having lost so many. I looked at Halvgar with a look that told him I wanted to know if he was being honest. He looked at me and clasped my shoulder, a tear forming, then curving down his sweaty cheek.
“Dangerous business, adventuring south. Not in score of lifetimes could I thank you for al
l this. You have no idea what you have done for this old dwarf.”
“Perhaps, soon enough, some wayward whore of a maid will have me for good, and I will have an idea, old boy,” I said and clasped his shoulder back. “The meat is done,” I added, seeing him smile. It was a sturdier smile than I had seen him wear in some months now. It seemed, too, as if it might stay there for more than a moment.
But it did not.
He nodded.
I asked him: “Won’t you wake those cantankerous little bastards up for me?”
* * *
After we ate, it quickly became dark. The moon hung low over the distant hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west. We began to trek once again up the slope of a long, low meadow of stone and grass. The sloping field was lined with a single brake of high evergreens. The trees were shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet were dull yellow flowers. Beyond it, the hills were less grassy, and some were grassless altogether, just bald hilltops of blunt and rounded rock.
A wounded horse was running, three-legged, across a low side of the hill. It was not my old horse, the one that I had seen lose a leg to the dragon. That one had bled out and died within minutes, and it seemed the cruelest sort of magic that this one was still alive. My forehead throbbed as a swath of tracks appeared, the hooves of a dozen more horses that had meandered into the odd hills ahead of us. They had been walked over by the tracks of dwarf-like creatures.
