The Dragon At War

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "I doubt it," said Aargh.

  "You see," went on Sir John, still companionably, "the King of France intends to invade England. For some reason he seems to be very sure of his ability to land an army across the Channel on our shores. If such an army landed, of course it would come through here, devastating all in its path. Including, come to think of it, this territory of yours—just what are its boundaries?"

  "This wood and the next one eastward and the one beyond that," said Aargh, "and westward to the Meres and the seashore. Even to the Loathly Tower, of which you'll have heard, and down to the water beside and beyond it. What is there is still there. So far, it has not challenged me, and I have not challenged it. True, the sandmirks rule that territory, but they move out of my way when I come. It is mine."

  "But you could leave it for a little while," said Sir John.

  "I could. But I won't," said Aargh. "All this is mine because none can take it from me. To the east, to the north and even to the south there are others of my own kind who watch and wait. In time I will grow old and stiff and slower than I am now. Then the time will come when, one by one, they'll start to challenge me. In the end one will kill me and this land will be his. That's as it should be. But if I leave it empty I may come back to find some other of them already in occupation—one or even a pack. That would cause me trouble; and I see no reason to go to trouble for you, Sir Knight."

  "But how about the French army?" said Sir John. "You may be ready to meet all challengers, but surely you realize you can't defeat an army. The French will slay you."

  Aargh opened his jaws in one of his silent laughs. When he was done he closed the jaws again with another snap.

  "They must find me first, Sir Knight," he said. "And I tell you that a thousand such as you could comb these woods and never find me. More than several thousand would fail. I am a wolf, Sir Knight; and wolves are not easily found when they do not want to be found. That would not stop me from finding them, by one and one; and the ones I found would be left dead. I am no boar or bear to be driven, cornered and brought to battle."

  "Ah," said Sir John, still in the same calm, engaging voice, "your help—those things which you can do which no one else can do—will, I'm sure, be sorely missed by Sir Giles and Sir James. I am sure we will all be sad that you won't accompany them."

  "Sad or happy, what difference does it make to me?" snarled Aargh. "I am not one of your tame curs to whine and lick your hand because you are unhappy."

  He turned to Jim.

  "Was it for this, you called me?" he asked Jim. "You might have known better, if so."

  "It wasn't the entire reason," said Jim. "I also wanted to tell you that Carolinus is safe in my castle now and we hope to have him well again, shortly."

  "That is interesting," said Aargh, "though of no great import. All creatures die. But I will say that, like all we who go on four legs, I like the Mage. I wish him well; and with you and Angela his chance is best."

  "Thanks," said Jim, more touched than he dared allow himself to show in the tone of his words. Aargh was as disdainful of emotion in others as he was of it in himself.

  "Leave your cloth where it is in the stump, then," said Aargh. "I'll keep my eye on it and not be far distant at any time. If I see it gone, I will know that the Mage is well again. If you need me for his sake, double it and tuck both ends of the cloth in."

  "I'll do that," said Jim.

  "Then farewell," said Aargh, and left.

  "Remarkable," said Sir John, staring at the empty space where Aargh had been, it seemed, a moment before. "It is almost as if the wolf could vanish like a magician, himself."

  "It's a habit of his," admitted Jim. "I think all wolves can do it."

  Sir John sighed.

  "Well, gentlemen," he said, "it seems we might as well return to the castle."

  He glanced at Jim.

  "—Or will the wolf return?"

  "No. Not without some reason," said Jim.

  They remounted and rode somberly back to the castle. They had barely dismounted in the courtyard, however, before a castle servant came rushing up to Jim.

  "M'Lord! M'Lord!" he said. "The Lady Angela bids you come to the room where the magician Carolinus lies, with all haste!"

  "Go ahead!" Jim told him. "I'll be right there."

  "Should we go with you, James?" asked Giles.

  Jim shook his head.

  "I don't think so," he said rapidly. "If my Lady-wife wished anyone else, she'd have asked for them, too. Would you mind waiting for me at the high table in the Great Hall? If it turns out I'm delayed, I'll send to let you know."

  The other men nodded. Jim turned, and headed toward the Great Hall himself as fast as his rank would allow. As Lord of the castle he could not be seen running like a common servant—at least, not without more reason than there had been in the message that just reached him. But he walked as swiftly as he could into the castle. Only, mounting the stairway of the tower—with no one watching—he allowed himself to run. He was imagining Carolinus suddenly gone in a very bad state indeed. If so, heaven hope he was in time to do whatever he could, or at least to be there.

  But when he burst through Carolinus's door, with tottery legs, and out of breath from the long, winding, stone staircase that circled the inside of the tower, it was to find no emergency in progress.

  In fact, quite the reverse. Angie was sitting with her arms folded, in a chair a little back from the bedside. There were no servants in the room. Another empty chair sat close beside the bed. In the bed itself was Carolinus, propped up on pillows and drinking tea from a cup and saucer. Both were of the kind of fine china that Jim was absolutely positive was not ordinarily to be found in fourteenth-century England, either in the past of his own old world or in the present of this one. Clearly, Carolinus was not only better, but able to work his magic again.

  He had even recovered the customary bristle to his mustaches and the snappish look of his expression.

  "Well, here you are," he said to Jim. "High time! Sit down there, by the bed."

  Jim took the empty chair.

  "It's marvelous to see you looking so good, Carolinus," Jim said. "I could almost believe you weren't telling me all of it, when you said that magic could help wounds but not cure ills."

  "Well, my damnable bed sores were wounds, weren't they?" said Carolinus. "As far as the ills go, I was probably over that a week ago, but I never got a chance to know it, the way those two were feeding me with purges and emetics and the like."

  "Actually," said Jim, "I've been waiting for the time when you'd get well enough that I could talk to you about something rather strange that happened to me just before I got back here—"

  "Never mind that!" said Carolinus. He was his old imperious self; but there was something—something missing about him, that Jim could not seem to put his finger on. "There are more important things I want to talk about. Are you listening?"

  Jim cast a hopeful glance at Angie; but she looked icily back at him over folded arms as she sat in her chair. Clearly she had not got over the way she had been feeling toward him the previous evening. Jim turned his attention back to Carolinus.

  "I'm listening," he said.

  "Very well," said Carolinus, and took a sip of tea. He frowned over at the kettle.

  "Not warm enough!" he said.

  The kettle gave a short, apologetic whistle.

  "Never mind, this time," said Carolinus. "I've warmed it up myself and made sure the milk and sugar in it are the right proportions. But keep the temperature in mind. Now, Jim—"

  Jim gave the elderly magician all his attention.

  "I'm afraid I had to mislead you," he said. "But at the time I spoke to you first about this, you weren't involved in magic to any real extent—I must say you're hardly involved even now, but you'll have to learn to use it, anyway—I told you there were no sorcerers, only magicians who had gone wrong. You've since experienced a case of that in the matter of the AAA magician of France, Malvin
ne; and you remember his end."

  Jim did. Jim shuddered. He remembered a limp Malvinne being drawn up to the great shadowy figures of the King and Queen of Death, like a rag doll on a string.

  "Now, I have no choice," continued Carolinus. "You must be enlightened. Jim, there are sorcerers."

  "Oh?" said Jim.

  "Oh?" snorted Carolinus. "Is that all you have to say? I tell you of a fact that shakes the world, and all you say is—'oh'!"

  "I'm—I'm wordless," said Jim.

  "Well, that's good," went on Carolinus. "In any case, there are sorcerers. In some ways, they appear just like magicians. But they aren't. They've no Accounting Office to keep their records straight, they're strictly single operators, and they begin by selling themselves to the Dark Powers in return for learning magic. They do learn a sort of magic; but it is not the kind you and I know. It's magic which can be turned only to evil purposes."

  Jim felt a chill run down his back. For the first time the potential of what Carolinus was telling him had begun to register on him. Clearly, Carolinus did not take these sorcerers lightly. And if Carolinus didn't take them lightly—what should they mean to someone like himself, a mere C rated magician? So this was the reason behind what Carolinus wanted to tell him.

  "The kind of magic that these sorcerers learn is called counter-magic," said Carolinus. "To distinguish it from that which you and I use. Now, our magic is created and designed to be used only for good purposes. It can't be used for evil, or for gain, personal gain that is—you're aware that you're not allowed to sell your magical services until you're at least A rank?"

  "No," answered Jim, "you never told me."

  "Strange," said Carolinus, frowning. "I distinctly had the impression I had. However, you've been told now. Officially, at any rank up to an A you're still within the apprentice bounds. However, back to the point. A qualified magician, A or above, can receive fees for his magical services in order to keep a roof over his head and food on his table and such, but anything more than this is frowned on, as in Malvinne's case."

  Jim was frowning a little himself. The first time he had seen Carolinus was when he had been in the body of a dragon. And his dragon granduncle, Smrgol, had needed to bargain Carolinus down from fifteen pounds of gold to four pounds of gold, one pound of silver and a large flawed emerald—just for some information.

  "What do you do with the gold and jewels you get in fees?" asked Jim, suddenly curious; for Carolinus lived simply in his little cottage and apparently had no large expenses.

  "None of your business!" snapped Carolinus. "There's a great deal you don't understand about the use of magic. When you're A class, come and talk to me again about it."

  "Oh, all right," said Jim.

  "Now, where was I? Oh, yes—sorcerers," went on Carolinus. "As I was saying, there are sorcerers. When the King of France lost Malvinne as his private royal magician and minister, he hunted around for a substitute; and came up with not a magician at all, but a sorcerer named Ecotti. Who, being deeply hated and feared in his native Italy, was only too glad to move into the French royal palace and take up where Malvinne had left off. But, of course, his magic is all dark magic. Destructive magic. He readily fell in with the King of France's plan to invade England—"

  "Oh, you know about that?" said Jim.

  "Of course!" said Carolinus. "I wish you'd stop interrupting. The point is, Ecotti realized what King Jean of France did not; and that any invasion of England must naturally find me helping its defense. There are, as you know, only two others like me in the world. Ecotti alone could never hope to face me."

  Carolinus frowned darkly.

  "So," he said, "someone else was at work behind what happened to me—and that involves you, Jim."

  Chapter Nine

  "What do you mean?" Jim demanded.

  Carolinus ignored the question.

  "Whoever it is, is clever, there's no doubt about it," he said, grimly. "To attack me! Not by counter-magical means, except possibly in one slight measure. That was to introduce an uncomfortable, but by no means dangerous, illness into the kettle you see before me."

  The kettle gave an unhappy little whistle.

  "I'm not blaming you!" Carolinus snapped at it. "You're only an inanimate object, though you seem to forget that from time to time. There's no way you could defend yourself, or even be aware of what was being done to you."

  He cleared his throat and continued to Jim.

  "At any rate, as you know, I was made sick; and meanwhile, by completely nonmagical means, word I was ill was passed to that particular gaggle of vagabonds you saw about my cottage; and to those two female torturers you saw. The results, you know. Those women were well on the way to wearing me down to where someone of my mature years couldn't survive. If it'd worked, I'd have been dead; and a fine mess that would have left all of you, and England, in."

  He glared at Jim, as if it was Jim's fault.

  "Happily, I smelled a rat," he said. "I investigated and found the trace of magic on my kettle. From that, by methods you'll not be learning for some time, I was able not only to cleanse the kettle, but to trace back and realize evil was at work."

  He paused to take a sip of tea.

  "It wasn't easy," he went on. "You'll find for yourself the concepts necessary to making full-scale magic—our type of magic—takes a certain amount of strength; and my strength had been drained just then. I'd barely enough to cleanse the magic from the kettle and send it to you. Little did I know that you'd be dallying to pick flowers; and so the kettle got to your castle and found you not there. Being merely a magic-touched inanimate object, as I keep reminding it—"

  He threw a severe glance at the kettle. This time, it accepted this in silence.

  "—It had no more capacity than to wait to deliver the message I had sent until you got there. Happily, when you did, you came and got me."

  "Of course!" said Jim and Angie both together.

  "It was a special case, you understand," said Carolinus gruffly. "Ordinarily, I'd scarcely need the help of people like yourselves. I'm fond of you, true; but that doesn't close my eyes to the fact that you're rather in the case of midgets helping a giant."

  "Speaking of giants," said Jim, seizing on the opening, "that's the very thing I wanted to speak to you about. When I was gathering some flowers for Angie a very strange thing happened—"

  "If you don't mind," snapped Carolinus, "we'll stick to the point. I was speaking. The point is that I was supposed to die; so that the French invasion would find no strong magical opposition to its sweeping through England. Believe me, this time it would have been able to do so—even without the help of the Scots; whom the French King plans to conquer as soon as he has England subdued, anyway."

  "Ah!" said Jim.

  "Bleating 'ah' isn't necessary," retorted Carolinus. "Any child could reason that much. But back to more important things. The point is I've survived. But I'm still hampered."

  He looked fiercely at Jim.

  "The difficulty," he said, "is that real magic—the magic we use—is by definition not punitive. I can use it to defend, as I use wards about my cottage and grounds; but I can't use it to attack, without a very clear and obvious reason—such as that if I do not attack now, I will be attacked myself, inevitably."

  "I don't understand," said Jim.

  "I understand," said Angie, behind him. "He means he can't attack this—whoever—without clear evidence that 'whoever' is going to attack him. But Carolinus—"

  She looked directly at the magician.

  "—Whoever it was did try to kill you!" she went on. "Even if by roundabout ways. Isn't that enough to justify your doing something back?"

  "Not as long as I survived; as I now have," said Carolinus. "Unless there's evidence it'll be tried again."

  "Well if the French invade, aren't you likely to be killed?" asked Angie.

  "Yes—and no," said Carolinus. "They'd need magical help, no matter how large their army, to get at me behind my
magical defenses. You two and the other landholders around here won't be as lucky."

  "Well then," said Jim, "what's to be done?"

  "I'll tell you what's to be done!" said Carolinus. "I've got to find who's the real power behind Ecotti, and plotting to get me. Counter-magic alone could infect my kettle, but not without some real magic to keep me from immediately discovering it—otherwise, it couldn't be done without my knowing it. That points to a real magician at work, helping Ecotti. But the Accounting Office assures me none were involved."

  "I see," said Jim.

  "I hope so, for your sake," said Carolinus. "Because whoever is behind it is also forwarding the invasion. This is all beyond your level of magic, Jim; but I have a perfect conviction that there is a hidden Mastermind there. Ecotti is nothing by himself. He's found some partner or partners who make the invasion possible. To cross the Channel, except in the best of weather, without losing dozens of troop ships and having even many more blown off course, so that the French forces land scattered and out of touch with each other, is something that's daunted, and will daunt, a great many people both in the past and the future."

  He frowned at Jim.

  "You have knowledge of attempts that were made after our time, in the world you came from."

  "That's right," said Jim. "The Nazis were going to try a cross-Channel invasion in World War II. It never came off."

  "And King Jean wouldn't be so confident, if he didn't have help. Now, that necessary help can only come from the sea itself," said Carolinus. "I've discovered that Jean's found, through Ecotti, some unholy alliance with the tribe of sea serpents that populate all the seas; and some leader among the serpents themselves has risen who can bring the rest together to act as a group. Normally they have little to do with one another once they're mature. Do you know anything about sea serpents, Jim?"

  "Only," said Jim thoughtfully, "that the dragon Smrgol reminded me, just before we had our fight at the Loathly Tower, that Gorbash had an ancestor who'd met a sea serpent in single combat and won. Apparently, this was an unusual thing for a dragon to be able to do."