Dog and Dragon-ARC

by Dave Freer

  And then sleep came.

  She awoke to the sound of a rather nasty snigger.

  There was something up the tree…with their skirts. A tiny blue-green-skinned man with a little tuft beard and narrow eyes all dancing with mischief. He was wearing nothing more than a hat of new leaves pinned with a hawthorn spike and a ragged cloak, so perhaps he didn’t consider skirts as necessary.

  Meb leapt up, axe in hand. “You drop those! Or I’ll…I’ll chop your tree down!”

  “Ach. Mean and spiteful. Then I’ll toss them in the stream. You’ll be lucky to find them at all, and they’ll be even wetter!” said the little green fellow, sticking his tongue out at them.

  Bribery might work better. “You just woke me up suddenly. Come down and have some breakfast. We’ve got oatcakes and some honey.”

  “Oh, changing our tune are we, fine ladies. Fine ladies without skirts,” he said, wrinkling his pointy little nose at them, but coming down.

  “It’s a piskie…just like in Gamma stories,” said Neve warily.

  “Aye, and she had her skirts up or right off often enough, too,” said the piskie. “Now you promised oatcakes and honey. We’re fond of honey. Doesn’t come our way too often, because bees are not fond of us.”

  “It’s only a very little jar of honey,” said Meb.

  And in the distance—but not too great a distance—a horn sounded.

  “What’s that?” said Meb, relieving the piskie of her damp skirts. He wasn’t worried by his nakedness, so she didn’t see why she should be, although Neve stuck under the fur and struggled with hers.

  “Just the soldiers from the Dun. They probably saw the smoke of your fire,” said the piskie disinterestedly.

  “We must find somewhere to hide,” said Meb, looking around.

  “But you offered me oatcakes and honey,” said the piskie, sticking out his lower jaw, plainly angry, his little tuft of a beard wobbling, his cheeks flushing green.

  “No time to find them now.” said Meb, grabbing the little knocker bag. “If they don’t catch us, you can have the whole jar as far as I am concerned.”

  “Now that’s a bargain. Just you wait right here!” said the piskie, and let out a shrill whistle. Other whistles answered, and he bounded off, up into the tree.

  “What do we do?” asked Neve nervously.

  “Move. I haven’t been through all of this to get caught without at least trying to get away,” said Meb, pulling her to her feet.

  “Ouch. Blisters,” said Neve, hobbling.

  Meb’s own feet were not in a much better state. They’d been cold and numb the night before. Now the sun was up and it was looking to be a glorious spring day. “As far as those rocks. Let me see if I can manage some sort of glamor to hide us there.” If she could look like Hallgerd, and make the axe look like a stick, surely she could make herself look like a rock.

  And it seemed she could. There was a little niche and, with Neve inside it, Meb sat against her legs and thought rock thoughts. The axe she made into a flying holly sapling. So they sat, Meb wondering if this could possibly work, and thinking “don’t see me” thoughts.

  No riders came. She heard them in the distance, several times. What did come was a little naked blue-green man, in a green hat and a ragged cloak—with half a dozen of his kind, some male, some female, and all wearing little more than leaves or acorn-cap outfits.

  “Ach, tricksie humans. Cheated me,” said the piskie crossly. “She promised me a whole jar of honey.”

  “I don’t cheat,” said Meb.

  Piskies vanished in the twinkling of an eye.

  And then the little leaf hat reappeared, followed by the piskie wearing it. “You gave us a fright,” he said crossly. “We trick humans. Not you trick us. Not unless you want us to curse you.”

  “I can hide better than you. Maybe I can curse better than you too,” said Meb.

  That took a moment to sink in. “Ah. Well now, no offense, but if you can hide better than we can, why did the horsemen worry you?”

  Meb did not say “because I didn’t know I could, and I am not sure it would work on Neve.” She had a feeling telling the piskies that would only lead to more trouble, and a fair amount of mischief directed at her companion. “Because I knew you could lead them astray better than I can. And last time the castle people came hunting…let’s put it this way: I should have hidden from them the first time, because ever since Earl Alois tried to kill me, they’ve tried.”

  “Aye,” said tufty beard proudly. “That we can. We’re the best. They’re so mazed they’ll never be home before nightfall. Earl Alois, eh? He went through our woods a while back. We didn’t know or we’d have made him so lost he never got home.”

  “A pity you didn’t,” said Meb as she dug through the bag and came up with the little crock of honey. “Here you are. As promised. We’ll have our oatcakes without it.”

  “Ach,” said the piskie generously. “I daresay we’ll spare you a little.”

  So they broke their fast on little knocker oatcakes with a circle of largely naked—bar leaf and wood scraps—piskies. Meb reflected their food would last far less time than she’d thought, at this rate. On the other hand, not only had any form of pursuit failed to find them, the men of the troop would probably be blaming her, and far less keen to try again. For once, being blamed for something she hadn’t done was going to work in her favor. That made a change.

  After they’d eaten, lighter by some oatcakes and their honey, Meb and Neve took their leave and hobbled on. After a little while, Meb stopped and took her shoes off. “I’ll try barefoot for a bit, Neve. My heels and toes are raw.”

  “We’ll look like poor peasants then, m’lady.”

  “Well, that’ll be a good thing,” said Meb.

  And it was easier walking. Yes, it still hurt when the grass touched raw flesh, but they came on a path quickly enough. All of these lands must have been farmed—and probably still would be, if Lyonesse stayed free of invaders for any time. The path must have been a cart track once, between fields and hedges and forest patches, all overgrown and beginning to show spring signs. It was too early in the season for most food plants, but they gathered asparagus shoots from the banks as they walked, and ate some of them raw. It was a long day, and warm. “Oatcakes and asparagus are not as fine as castle food, but they taste fresher,” said Neve.

  “That’s because the castle food was mostly stale bread, bespelled and stretched,” said Meb. “And this might be simple but it’s real. But by the look of the sky, food and shelter are going to be real issues, and soon too, not to mention piskies.”

  “You should never mention them,” said the ugly pile of misshapen rock fallen from the lichen-cloaked drystone wall on the corner. It stood up and Neve tried to pull Meb into joining her in running away.

  “It’s a spriggan! Run!” shrieked Neve.

  The spriggan was growing before their eyes and was now considerably bigger than they were. It still looked like it had been badly carved out of granite. “You run. I’ll hold it back,” Meb said, swinging the axe.

  “I can run faster than you,” said the spriggan showing square teeth. “And your axe is not cold iron, but some faerie metal. ’Tis sharp. Magic sharp, I’d grant.”

  “If you want to try it out, I’ll help you,” said Meb, looking it in the eye. She couldn’t think of what else to do, really.

  “I thought I was going to help you,” said the spriggan, shrinking and changing before their eyes. Meb knew where she’d seen that sort of triangular alvish grey face before—when she’d been riding with the hunting party. They’d been watching her then.

  “What are you planning to help us with?” asked Meb.

  “Food and shelter were what you sought, I thought,” said the spriggan. “Shelter is easy enough. Food is a bit more difficult. Not food for the likes of you, anyway. Simple fare is easy enough. But the noble ladies of Lyonesse wouldn’t want to eat that.”

  “Given a choice, I would,” sa
id Meb. “I’ve had enough of fancy food that tasted of stale bread for my lifetime. Give me stale bread that tastes like stale bread and I’ll be happy.”

  “Ah. Stale bread is a challenge. We’ve got fresh, but it’d take a few days to make it stale. But if that’s what you want…”

  “No, fresh is even better.”

  “Well, it’ll make you sick, I shouldn’t wonder,” said the spriggan.

  “They’re dangerous, m’lady,” said Neve timidly. “Spirits of old giants, so they do say.”

  “Spirits of the rocks and tors actually,” said the spriggan. “And we’re dangerous all right, but not to you. Sadly.”

  “The knockers and piskies did us no harm, Neve,” said Meb reasonably. “You even had knocker babies on your lap.”

  “Probably piddled on you,” said the spriggan with a kind of gloomy satisfaction. “They do.”

  “They were good little things,” said Neve defensively. “Nice to me and m’lady.”

  “Ah, should have been suspicious then,” said the spriggan. “I daresay they gave you food which turned your insides to wax or something.”

  “You’re a grumpy so-and-so,” said Meb.

  “We have that reputation, yes. Now if you’ll follow me, I think we’ve got a few rabbits and some wild onions in the pot. Won’t agree with you, of course.”

  Meb shouldered the axe, stepped forward and took the rather surprised-looking spriggan by the arm. Grey-skinned and touched with lichens, he was still warm, she noticed. “Lead on. Come on, Neve. He won’t eat us, or he would have, because there is another one at the start of the lane. We’re between them.”

  The spriggan blinked. “My brother will give you a hand with the bags, if you like,” he said, escorting her in as courtly a manner as any of the haerthmen of the prince’s retinue.

  They walked up the hill, to where the abandoned walled fields gave way to grazing lands and to the rocky tor at the top. Meb recognize it from her day’s hunting, and realized just how close to Dun Tagoll they still were. “It was you that I saw, watching me, wasn’t it?”

  The spriggan nodded. “We weren’t too sure how to talk to you in all that press around you. Too much cold iron. It won’t kill us straight off, but we don’t like it.”

  He tapped a rock and it slid aside to reveal a passage down. “An old tomb,” he said cheerfully. “Gloomy but clean and dry.”

  Meb suppressed a shudder. “Just don’t mention the tomb part to Neve. She’s…she’s lived a bit of a sheltered life, compared to me. Can we leave it open?”

  “It’ll let the spiders in, I daresay.”

  “For now.” A glance showed Neve was almost white with terror. Meb winked at her, to tell her it would be all right. And Neve managed a smile, and appeared to relax slightly.

  They walked down stone steps and into what should have been the cold of the tomb. The spriggans plainly didn’t have much regard for these ideas, as it was pleasantly warm, and scented with…not dust and decay, but the smell of onions, garlic, wild thyme, and cooking meat. It might once have been a tomb, but the current occupants had scant respect for funerary furniture or the dead that might have lain there, having used the central sarcophagus to make a table, on which they had laid a cloth, and around which they’d placed several three-legged stools. A fire burned in a grate in the corner, with a pot hanging from a hob, from which the smells were plainly coming.

  “Welcome to our lair,” said the spriggan, rather formally.

  Meb wasn’t sure how one answered that, but she had a feeling that formally would be best. “Our thanks to you. May it remain dry and warm and safe,” she said.

  “What…what are you cooking?” asked Neve, warily.

  “Rabbits. We have to make do. We can’t get enough unwary travelers these days,” said the spriggan tending the pot.

  “Stop teasing her,” said Meb sternly, hoping she was the one not being naive. But they were just enough like Finn, when he was being outrageous, for her to recognize it. “The fay here seem to delight in mocking people.”

  “But there is so much to mock,” said the spriggan who had escorted her. “I suppose it is that you humans are more numerous, more powerful than us in many ways. It’s that or kowtow to you. And we’d rather mock.”

  The cook looked thoughtful. “The muryan are hard-working, serious and not given to practical jokes, if they understand jokes at all.”

  “Yes, but there are more of them than humans. And look where it has gotten them.”

  Meb looked at the stone-coffin table. Five places laid, trenchers ready. Three spriggans and the two of them. “Either you were expecting us, or you’re expecting some more spriggans.”

  “Ah. It’s what they said. She’s so sharp it’s a wonder she doesn’t cut herself. Probably will, with that axe. Or her brain will overheat with all that thinking,” said the spriggan cook.

  “Don’t you say nasty things about m’lady,” said Neve, straightening up. “She’s had enough of that.”

  That seemed to amuse the spriggans. “Wouldn’t dare, your majesty, wouldn’t dare. Now, if you want to put your things down and take a seat, the food has been ready awhile, but you’re slow.”

  “Who told you to expect us?” asked Meb.

  “The knockyan—what you call knockers. Very full of it they were. But their tunnels are a bit tight for your kind.”

  That was reassuring. Meb knew the knockers had liked them, and if they were willing to trust the spriggans, then presumably the rabbit stew wasn’t a first course to fatten up two women as the main roast. The stew was very good indeed, so good that it didn’t worry either of them that one of their hosts got up to close the front door to keep the rain out.

  “To think,” said Meb, stomach full, warm and sore feet up on what could easily be the treasure chest of a dead king, “that I worried about food and shelter on our journeying.”

  “Tonight is well enough,” said the spriggan, “but they’ll be looking for you. The mage has tools in his tower and he’ll have traces of you. Best to go further off, and to keep moving a while.”

  “The piskies seemed to think they could stop us being followed.”

  “Ah, but that’s piskies for you,” said the spriggan. “They’re not great on the understanding of things. We can’t really shelter you indefinitely, any more than the piskies can mislead the prince’s troops indefinitely. Neither we nor they can stand cold iron, and their misleading and mazing can be dealt with by turning your clothes. Once the prince’s men realize that they’re being piskie-led, they’ll counter it. Our kind are weak and small here, for all we seem frightening. There are places where it is otherwise, where our kin rule. We are kin to those you call alvar, just as the knockyan are distant cousins to the dvergar.”

  “Um. You’re nicer than a lot of the alvar I’ve met,” said Meb, thinking of the faintly supercilious attitude of even Finn’s friends Leilin and her sister. Finn had told her that the alvar were of many different groups, but this degree of difference had not occurred to her.

  It amused them, and seemed to please them.

  “It’s not a reputation we need among humans. We’ve changed too, with being here. The underlying magic of the worlds shapes us.”

  Meb juggled for them. It seemed the least payment she could offer for shelter and food. The spriggans enjoyed it. Not with the childlike delight of the knockers, but with an appreciation of craft. They slept on a bed of heather in the corner of the tomb that night, and Meb slept better and longer than she had since she’d lost Finn and Díleas. Tiredly, just before she slept, she wondered if there was some kind of magic that would at least allow her to see them. It would make such a difference to know they were safe and happy and that all was well back in Tasmarin.

  The next day brought a gruel breakfast, salve and leaf plasters for their feet, and a quiet, friendly but firm escort further from Dun Tagoll. “We are tied to the tor. We cannot go more than half a league from it. You’ll find that’s true of all of the spriggans
and piskies here. They have their place, and they’re quite strong in it,” said the spriggan walking along with them. “The knockyan can travel but don’t like to. The muryan, well, they do move, but it’s war when one tribe meets another.”

  Neve coughed. “I didn’t ever believe in the muryan either.” She turned to Meb. “Do the magic creatures come to see you, m’lady? I mean…I lived all my life in the village and people talked of these things…it was stories. Some you believed and some, well, you mostly didn’t. Never saw any myself, never saw one in Dun Tagoll either…until with you. Now, it is as if they’re everywhere. Even,” she colored, “when I went to relieve myself, without you. There was this little blue-green man looking at me.”

  “I hope you were very rude to him!”

  “I was,” admitted Neve.

  “The piskie have no sense of privacy,” said the spriggan. “Now if it had been one of us, you could have known it was to laugh at you. But they barely understand clothes. They wear them for pretty, when they feel like it. And of course we come to see you. We’ve always been here, but many were in a kind of hibernation. Like bears in winter. Now the fay of the land are waking as the magic pours back in. Like the equinox flood tide it’s been, after so many years.”

  Tasmarin. Magic and energy confined there for so long must be flowing back here. Suddenly Meb knew exactly what the problem with their Changer was. In a way, she was really the right one for the mage to blame. It was her, her and Fionn, back in Tasmarin that had started this. Mind you, it could have been worse, had Fionn succeeded in his original aim of destroying the place and returning all its parts and people to where they came from.

  “And of course,” said the spriggan, “we can’t go to the Old Place on the headland, where the castle now stands. It’s been bespelled against us for many a year. But even that weakens.”

  ***

  “Fleeing certainly confirms her treachery,” said Lady Cardun.

  “It may, but how was she able to do so?” asked Prince Medraut. “My man should easily have been able to deal with two women. And yet they disarmed him, cost him a finger, and frightened him into gibbering superstitious nonsense at half of the men-at-arms in the Dun. And the troop that was out this morning managed to get lost. Lost! A good half of them were born around here. They couldn’t get lost in a thick fog. But they claim they blundered around country they’ve never even seen. And I’ve been shown it myself—they’re black and blue from something. They’re claiming it was bewitchment or a curse. And half of them are blaming Shadow Hall and the other half are saying it was Lady Anghared punishing them. If it wasn’t for Aberinn and the fact that he keeps the Dun safe and provisioned, they’d desert.”