Dark Lord of Derkholm

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Blade and Kit found themselves dumped on the grass, sliding. While they staggered and bumped into one another, Scales glided in to land beside a tall boulder which had a small golden shape dancing on top of it. “There you are, girl. No problems. Got you the black cat-bird, too, while I was at it. I thought you’d want him. No accounting for tastes.”

  “Lydda!” Kit and Blade screamed.

  Lydda rose up rampant to wrap both forearms around Scales’s huge neck and rub her beak delightedly against his great muzzle. “Thank you, Scales. I love you.” She looked tiny beside him.

  “My pleasure,” grunted Scales. “I like you, too.” He had a preening sort of arch to his neck, as if he meant it.

  Lydda laughed, leaped down from her boulder, and bounded to meet Kit and Blade. They did the griffin dance none of them had done since they were small, circling and jumping, wings spread, arms waving, all of them laughing their heads off, until Blade ran out of breath and left the other two still at it. Lydda looked small to him, even now. This was a new Lydda, he realized, slender and sleek and bright-eyed, with a deadly look to her talons and an even more deadly look of power to the glistening sweep of her long bent-up golden wings. She was batting Kit joyfully on the beak with them, but they still looked deadly.

  “Hey! Doesn’t she look tremendous!” Blade said to Scales.

  “Good hunter, too,” Scales agreed. “I met her out hunting yesterday. That’s how she knew where I was, after she’d trailed you down to that sandpit. How did you get into that mess? Eh?”

  “Barnabas. He’s being paid by Mr. Chesney to mine for magic,” Blade said. As he said Mr. Chesney’s name, Scales once again went lizard still. “But I don’t know how Kit got there,” Blade added.

  Kit and Lydda were now jumping over one another by turns, wings spread and beating. The contrast between Lydda’s spread of golden feathers and Kit’s clipped ones was painful.

  “Grow some more feathers, cat-bird,” Scales boomed. “It’s unsightly.”

  Kit stopped prancing. He spread out the wing that had been broken and stared at it. His head swiveled accusingly at Scales.

  “That’s right,” said Scales. “I could mend that. But I don’t grow feathers.”

  “But,” said Kit, “I can’t. They won’t.”

  “Stupid,” growled Scales. “Like this.”

  Blade was not sure what Scales did. Kit stood for a moment with his head bent and then looked up at Scales in a startled way. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all, unless you want to grow scales, spines, and spikes as well,” Scales answered. “Sit down while you’re growing them and explain how you got into that sandpit. All this prancing about is making me hungry.”

  “He doesn’t mean most of the grumping,” Lydda murmured to Blade. “But I think dragons have to keep sort of half angry most of the time. Did you know you’d torn your vest?”

  Blade looked down at the slash Kit had made. His vest was hanging open over goose pimples and bloodstains, but there was no sign of the cut. “Thanks,” he said to Scales.

  “She wanted you in one piece,” Scales said, with a flick of his tail toward Lydda. “Well, Kit?”

  Kit was crouched facing the wind, as griffins did to keep warm, concentrating in some way. “It was the geese,” he said.

  “What?” said the other three.

  “After the soldiers shot me and I fell in the lake,” Kit explained, “I lay in the mud at the bottom and thought I was dead. Then a goose dived down beside me and dragged the arrows out with its beak. And I realized then that I was holding my breath and thought I’d better come up for some air. So I shoved up and floundered and gasped at the surface. By that time the whole flock of the geese was around me, pushing and pecking and getting my blood on their feathers. I tried to get away—I mean I can’t swim, but they kept pecking until I arrived at the shore. There was a man there telling them what to do, but they couldn’t get me out of the water, whatever he told them. The man pulled me out in the end, by my beak. Then he told me that he was very sorry, but he thought I really had to learn that killing people wasn’t a game, and he went away with the geese and left me lying there. It was odd. I wasn’t bleeding anymore, but my wing was broken, and I felt awful. And after a bit the hunters from Costamaret came with a cart. They’d been hunting lions for the arena, but they didn’t mind catching me instead. They tangled me in a net and cut my wing feathers; then they heaved me onto the cart and brought me along to Costamaret.”

  “I know how that feels,” Blade said, shivering.

  Kit looked at him broodingly. “Only partly,” he said. “You were the fourth person I had to fight. What do you think happened to the others? It’s horribly easy to kill a human. Lions are much more difficult. I had six lions. But lions and people were just the same. They all wanted to stay alive. So did I, at first. That was the awful part—them or me. And I had no more right than they did to be alive. I just had a beak and talons, and they didn’t.”

  “Yes, well, no need to get morbid,” Scales interrupted. “Dragons have that problem, too. Ah. Here comes that priggish mauve chit at last, being useful for once in her smug little life, I hope.” He lunged to his feet, suddenly dwarfing them all, and spread his wings with an impatient blatting. The mauve dragon circling in the distance snaked around into a long U-turn and glided toward him. “Shortsighted as well!” grumbled Scales. “Hurry it up, woman!”

  The mauve dragon landed, rather awkwardly, at a safe distance. She looked quite small beside Scales, and lizardly slender.

  “What’s the news?” Scales barked at her. The lady dragon released the claw she was holding awkwardly against her chest. Two white daylight owls sprang rather hastily out of it and glided, one to Blade and the other to Lydda. While they were detaching the message tubes from the feathery legs, the mauve dragon disdainfully shook free the padding the owls had been riding in. It proved to be Blade’s clothes that he had left in Mara’s Lair, and a thick coat. The messages were from Mara, too.

  Blade read: “Blade, darling, for goodness’ sake try to get to Derkholm as soon as you can. Your father needs you badly. I’ll meet you there and explain.”

  Lydda’s message said the same, except hers began, “Lydda, my love, I’m afraid your holiday’s over …”

  Dragons, it seemed, did not need to speak in order to exchange news. Scales rumbled, “Let’s get going, if you’re up to flying, cat-bird. She says we have to get to Derkholm.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  WHY ARE WE WAITING?” sang the Pilgrims outside the gate. There were so many of them by now that Derk could hear them like a massed choir, even through his defenses. The noise was the last straw to skeletal Fran. She had grown tired of sharing the ruins of the village with more and more Pilgrim Parties, anyway, and now they had taken to walking up the valley every day, singing. The Wizard Guides with them just shrugged when Fran objected—she had an idea that the wizards had put the Pilgrims up to it in the first place—and so the morning came when she had had enough. She walked up the valley ahead of the Pilgrims, where she found Derkholm hidden behind a white shiny substance that hurt her knuckles when she pounded on it. So she ducked around to see if the back entrance was open at all. There she had a considerable shock.

  “Did you know there’re dragons roosting all over the hills out at the back?” she demanded as she arrived on the terrace.

  “Nothing to do with me,” said Derk.

  Fran took in the hut on the terrace and the pigs. This was quite a shock to her, too. “I hardly know you from the pigs,” she said. “Are you coming out of there?”

  “No,” said Derk.

  “George!” screamed Fran. And when Old George arrived at a run, thinking someone was being killed, she said to him, “Hose. Now.” Then she rounded on Don. “And what are you doing—a great big creature like you—sitting there letting him get like this? Go and fetch your mother this instant. What are your wings for?”

  Don gulped. “You said dragons—”

/>   “That’s your problem,” Fran told him as Old George trotted back, unreeling hosepipe and surrounded by leaping, barking dogs, who were all looking forward to some fun for a change. “Fetch your mother this instant, or I’ll hose you, too!” Don fled in a squeak of talons and a rattle of wings. “Now,” Fran said to Derk, “I’m going to count up to three—”

  “Count to a hundred if you like,” Derk said.

  Fran snatched the hose from Old George, opened the nozzle to full, and turned it on the hut. Pigs squealed and squirted out from it, glistening. “Go back to where you belong!” Fran screamed at them, hosing mightily. They fled in sprays of water, and the dogs pursued them. By the barking and squealing, a royal chase shortly developed, around and around the plantations. Derk stood the hosing until he was soaked through and sitting in liquid pig manure and then crawled out onto the terrace. “Now get upstairs and get bathed and changed before Mara gets here,” Fran commanded.

  “She’s not coming,” said Derk.

  “Oh, yes, she is, if I have to fetch her myself!” Fran announced, and hosed Derk away in front of her, into the house.

  There Fran encountered the dwarfs. Derk owed it to the dwarfs that Fran did not follow him upstairs and hose him into the bathroom. All the time he was bathing—and it took awhile; he was rather astonished at how filthy he was—he could hear battle raging downstairs. Fran passed the hose to Old George, who was glad enough to use it, and took up a broom herself. Derk heard the repeated crack of it hitting dwarfish heads. There was a great deal of yelling, screaming, and protesting, mingled with the hissing of the hose. But by the time Derk had dried himself and put on clean clothes that had all somehow grown too loose everywhere, most of the yelling had stopped. As he came downstairs again, he could hear Fran and Old George doing mighty works with hose and broom in the kitchen. The dwarfs were all out on the terrace, sullenly cleaning out the hut. Callette was couched there among the broken remnants of black walls, with a grin at the ends of her beak, keeping the dwarfs up to their work.

  “I didn’t think I liked Fran,” she said to Derk, “until now. The dogs are still chasing the pigs, by the way.”

  Derk could hear them. “They needed the exercise,” he said.

  “We don’t,” Galadriel said pointedly.

  “Too bad,” said Callette. “Fran says you owe the mayor and the blacksmith for a herd of cows each, and the tailor for all his chickens and six other people for goats. And Dad for several tons of vegetables, of course. Can you pay, except by working?”

  “We could dock it from the tribute,” another dwarf suggested hopefully.

  “I don’t think those dragons out there will let you,” said Callette. “Keep working.”

  Feeling weak and too clean and sad, Derk went to sit on the ruins of a black wall that had once been a chair. He was nearly knocked off it by Elda. Don was with her, looking rather pleased with himself. Elda came bounding up, flashing in the sunlight from several hundred stray sequins that had somehow got lodged among her feathers. Derk suspected she had left them there on purpose when she last preened. “Steady on!” he said, swaying.

  “Sorry, Dad. I’d have been here ages before this, only I didn’t know what to do about the dragons,” Elda explained. “And you’ve made it so I couldn’t fly in. So I sat and wondered what to do until Don came and helped me. You bow to dragons and say, ‘Good morning.’ At least, Don did.” She rose up with her front feet on the wall and looked closely at Derk. “Dad! What’s the matter with you?”

  “Overwork,” said Derk. “Among other things. Elda, why—?”

  “Mum says she’ll be here as soon as she can,” Elda rushed on. “I was supposed to say. Querida fell over again, you see, and Mum has to help her put the people back in the cities, because they’re in one of Mum’s miniature universes and need to be made big again first.”

  “Is that what she needed it for?” Callette said. “Why?”

  “To prevent needless slaughter,” Elda explained rather pompously.

  “I don’t think I dare tell Talithan this!” Derk was murmuring when Mara herself walked onto the terrace. She was very much her usual self, in her ordinary clothes, with her hair in a big blond plait over one shoulder. Derk stared at her and felt weaker than ever.

  Mara had overheard Elda explaining. “Elda, does this mean you’ve only just got here? I trusted you!” And while Elda was protesting about the dragons, Mara turned and took a big golden armful of Don. “My love,” she began, and then her nose wrinkled. “Don, you smell of dirty lion. Go and get a bath at once, and then preen. You look as bad as you smell.” As Don galloped off, Mara flung herself on Callette next and hugged her. “Goodness, Callette, you’re far too thin! I can see it’s high time I came back!”

  The dwarfs took advantage of Callette’s being hugged to stop work and stand in a long row, bowing. Mara looked at them bemusedly and bowed back. “Would you care for something to eat, madam?” Dworkin said wistfully. “There’s a witch with a broom in the kitchen at the moment, but I hope she’ll leave if we explain that we need to cook for the lady of the house.”

  Mara laughed. “Then please tell her.” And as the dwarfs scampered into the house, she mouthed at Callette, “Who?”

  “Skinny Fran. She hit them with a besom for making such a mess,” Callette said.

  Mara turned, laughing, to Derk. Derk slid rather shakily off his wall chair and wondered whether to smile at her. Mara threw both her arms tightly around his chest, almost stopping his breath. She leaned her head against his shoulder and said, “Oh, Derk, I’m so sorry! I didn’t even realize I was being unkind. It was all Querida’s fault. I told her she was to come here and explain. Where is she? If she’s let that healer put her into a coma again, I shall pull her beastly leg right off!”

  “I’m here, I’m here!” Querida croaked. She hobbled out from behind a broken black archway, propped on her magic crutch.

  Mara barely looked at her. She was stroking Derk’s face now, saying, “You look quite good in a beard now your face is so thin, love! Oh, I could kill Querida!”

  “I think she means it, too,” Querida said to Callette. “I’ve never seen her so angry. It’s my miscalculation. I used to be married to Mara’s father, you know, and I’ve never felt Derk was good enough for the daughter of a man like that.”

  Mara said to Derk, “But what possessed you to shut yourself away among all this mess?”

  Derk was surprised to find he was grateful to Fran that the mess was not twice as bad. “Kit,” he said, and choked. “Blade. The last straw.”

  “Oh, I heard, I heard!” Mara said. “But I think Blade’s all right.”

  She and Derk seemed set to stand looking at one another all day.

  “Tstss!” Querida hissed disgustedly to Callette. “Do they want me to explain? Or not?”

  Callette’s response was “This wall’s really a chair.” She lifted Querida up and dumped her on the wall.

  Querida went stiff all over with outrage until she discovered that she was quite comfortable. The black stones felt like cushions.

  “Thank you, my dear,” she said. “Wizard Derk.” When Derk at last tore his attention from Mara, Querida said, “I apologize. Apologizing is not a thing I’m good at, so I’m only going to do it this once, and you’d better listen. You see, we wanted to put an end to the way Mr. Chesney is exploiting our world, and we hoped by making you Dark Lord that you’d make such a hash of it that the whole organization would fall apart. I thought that’s what the Oracles meant. But as soon as we arrived at Derkholm to meet Mr. Chesney, I realized that you were going to be rather efficient after all, and I cast about for some way to take your mind off the task. And I’m afraid I put a spell on Mara, to make her decide to leave you. I don’t suppose it did much good.”

  “Well, it didn’t exactly help,” Derk said. “Was letting me down over the demon and the god part of it, too?”

  Querida nodded her little dry chin. “But I was very busy. I was organizin
g the women wizards to send everything wrong that they could think of, you know.”

  “So,” Derk asked, hoping, “might it have been you who lent Mara money?”

  “I gave her money,” Querida replied. “I can afford it, and she was working on my plans after all.”

  “And are you satisfied now?” Derk asked.

  Querida looked a little glum. “I’m not sure. I didn’t in my wildest dreams ever think you’d shut the Pilgrims out. I really don’t know what’s going to happen about that. I’ve done my best to exploit the situation by putting the women wizards out there waving placards that say, ‘Go Home, Pilgrims,’ but I really don’t know where we go from here. I think we may be in bad trouble. You wouldn’t consent to open your gates again, would you?”

  Derk smiled down at Mara. “No. Not yet.”

  Querida sighed and watched the dwarfs hurry back with hastily carved plates of chicken and beef and a stack of bread. Evidently Fran was not having them in the kitchen for long. Some knelt down on the flagstones and made sandwiches, while others went around with mugs of beer.

  “You owe for the beer, too,” Callette said to Galadriel. “I’m keeping a list.” She reached over and took all the sandwiches that had been made so far. Don dashed out onto the terrace, a much paler gold, with pearls of water hanging on his feathers, and saw her eating them. He squawked indignantly. “Wait your turn,” Callette said calmly. “I’m still bigger than you.”

  “Oh, food!” someone cried out. “Let me at it!”

  Shona came limping up the terrace steps. She was followed by Geoffrey, the Ledburys, Dad and Mother Poole, and everyone else in Blade’s Pilgrim Party. The dwarfs exchanged looks and sped back to the kitchen for more. Fran could be heard as soon as they got there, making as much noise as the pigs and the dogs.

  “We’ve been walking for over a week!” Shona said, flopping down onto the flagstones. “I am so tired! When I saw the hills were full of dragons, I simply thought, I don’t care if they eat us, I just want to get home! But all they did was stare at us. Dad, I hope you don’t mind me bringing everyone in through the back way.”