Rogue Dragon

by Avram Davidson

  “Why, then, boy, you got the one thing that every Gentleman fears more than anything in the world. You got a dragon that knows better. You got a rogue dragon!”

  Light blazed in Jon-Joras’s mind. His body, which had been drooping with stiffness and with pain, jerked straight upright. “And that’s what you’re doing here!” He cried. “In the dragon pit—you’re training rogues!”

  Hue’s scarred head nodded, nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the dragon pits. We’re training rogues. We’re training the drags so that they’ll know better than to be distracted by banner-wefts and music. We’re training them so that they won’t waste time plucking at arrows. By the time we’re done and he’s ready to be released, you’ve got a dragon that’s what the Master Huntsmen claim every drag really is.” His voice sank and his thin, lipless mouth opened wide.

  “And aren’t they surprised…” he whispered.

  Memories of that “surprise,” the terror and the panic and the bloody slaughter, made Jon-Joras wince and shudder. But another memory, at first as small and nagging as a grain of sand under an eyelid, grew and grew and became large. “But a rogue dragon,” he said, slowly, “is still only a dragon. It may have learned cunning, but, physically, it is the same. Training hasn’t changed the fact that if you put a shot through a certain place, it dies. I pierced that rogue yesterday, myself. At least a hundred shots pierced it… the crux of the X-mark was obliterated, it was a bloody pulp… but the dragon didn’t die. Why not?”

  Hue looked at him, relishing the moment. “Why not? Why, because it’s true the dragon’s body hadn’t changed. But something else was changed. Not in the body. On the body. We don’t take drags that the Gentlemen have already fixed for themselves. Wouldn’t be fools if we did. Oh, no. We got our own chick-boys. And we finds our own chicks…”

  Faintly, faintly, conscious of the cold creeping over him, Jon-Joras saw Aëlorix looking at the dragon-cockerel, saw the acid-burned finger of the old marky pointing at the X-mark, heard the words, “Look where he put it, too!”

  “It’s only a matter of a few inches,” Hue said. “A difference you can’t see when you’re looking up from below, and all excited with the hunt. Only a few inches, yes, boy, but it might as well be a few miles.”

  Everything else that Hue told him seemed an anticlimax, though he would have found it exciting enough if he had heard it without the other. There had always been outlaw bands of one sort or another in the forest. But previously, generally, they had been content to remain in the forest.

  The one now established in the old Kar-chee castle, however, had no such intentions.

  And now a thought which had for some time not been far from the surface of Jon-Joras’s mind rose to his lips as well. The old Kar-chee castle…

  “But I don’t see,” he began slowly, then proceeded more rapidly; “I don’t see how, if the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say—”

  “They are! They are! I do say! No man alive knows more about they, boy, than I do. Dragons had been my science, boy, my library. I know what I tell you.” His thin, almost invisible lips curled away from his teeth.

  Jon-Joras, who had paused, brushed his black hair from his forehead, and went on, in part repeating himself in order to complete his question: “If the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say, how is that the Kar-chee could have used them as—so to speak—dogs, to hunt the people down with?”

  Hue’s fierceness was somewhat abated by his genuine puzzlement. His perplexity did not seem that of one who merely did not know an answer, rather it was the baffled attitude which comes from inability to understand the question. “What you mean, boy? That’s what the drags was— Karches.”

  Now it was Jon-Joras’s surprised incapacity to comprehend. “But the Kar-chee were not dragons—”

  “Course they was! What else was they?”

  Jon-Joras gestured. “Back down there, near where I slept last night, there’s a frieze—”

  “There’s a what?”

  “A frieze, a relief… Pictures I Carved into the wall, up above.”

  Hue shrugged, as he might shrug off a merely mildly-annoying insect. “Oh, them things. Not Karches, boy. Just big bugs. Karches is another name for dragons, just like ‘drag’ is another name for dragon.” Questions, more questions, tugged at Jon-Joras’s mind; he poured them out. How could the pea-brained dragons have ever conquered the Earth and transformed its land and sea—this was the burden of them. But it was clear that Hue knew nothing and cared nothing of all that. Whatever mass of legendary and ignorance his history consisted of, it was not the past which concerned him. So, in the face of his growing annoyance, the conversation changed from the past to the future.

  “What do you intend to do about the dragons, if you get into power,” Jon-Joras had asked. And the answer was immediate.

  “When we get into power? Drags? They shall all be killed, every one of them—in the egg, and out.”

  “And… the Gentlemen?”

  “They shall all be killed, every one of them—in the egg, and out.”

  At first Jon-Joras thought that Hue had not fully heard nor understood the second question, was still replying to the first. But then he realized that both of the questions had the same answer.

  V

  And in the night, the Kar-chee castle was penetrated.

  He had slept but ill, his aches and pains contending with what he had heard from Hue, and what he could not forget of the rogue dragon in the wood and the rogue dragon in the pit, at keeping him at least half-awake. He had heard the noises for quite some time before he even paid much attention to them—padding of feet, whispering, scuffling—and then, when he had begun to wonder vaguely what it was about—

  He smelled the smoke and guessed the fire before a scream came, signaling chaos. As even a man whose house is rocked by an earthquake may pause to put on his shoes, so, now, Jon-Joras, while the castle exploded into uproar, slowly and painfully drew on his trousers. They were fighting in the corridor by the time he got there, men of the castle against men he did not know, men in fleecy capes.

  Jon-Joras did not know them. But they seemed to know him. “There’s the outworlder!” someone shouted. He turned to try and identify the voice, knowing only that the accent was strange.

  Someone seized his arm. “Run! Run!” he cried. “Follow our line—follow our torches—when you see the last one, tell him, ‘Pony and pride!’ You got that? Then, run!”

  Jon-Joras ran. That is, he proceeded at a painful, agonizing stagger. The torches of the strangers were made of reeds bound in bundles, easy to distinguish from the tarry sticks of the castle-folk; nor were the strangers hard to tell apart, either.

  Stumbling and now and then crying out in sudden pain, he made his way through the confusion as best he could. It was only when he stumbled in the darkness that he realized the the fighting was behind him. For a moment he stood still, listening to the echo of it. Ahead, in the distance a single torch flared, and by the uncertain light he saw, or thought he saw, a fleecy cape.

  Slowly and fearfully, his hands groping out ahead of him, he made his away along. From the direction of the torch a voice cried, “Who’s that? Speak out, or I’ll arrow you—by my mother, I will!”

  In a strangled voice Jon-Joras said, “Pony and pride!” Then he shouted it: “Pony and pride! Pony and pride!”

  The man with the torch laughed. His hair and beard was the same light golden brown as his cape. “Come on, then… come on… Ah. The outworlder! How’s the fight going, up there? Well enough, I suppose, if someone had time to give you the word. All right!” He stopped and selected a reed torch from a pile at his feet, lit it, handed it over.

  “Now—” He gestured. “Straight along as you go, you come to a hole in the wall. Go through it. Wait! Take another light, slow as you’re humping along, one might burn out on you. On with you!”

  Actually, the torch did not burn out on him—quite. The hole led into a tunnel l
ike the one through which he’d entered the castle, though smaller. Again, the faint and alien odor troubled him… he thought it must be the long lingering emanation of the Kar-chee themselves. The floor of the tunnel was thick and soft and dusty. The roof was hung with cobwebs. The small hairs of his flesh began to prickle. He could have cried with relief when he finally saw torchlight ahead, and the air freshened on his face.

  Riding, curled up on his side, on the soft floor of the litter was better than riding astride a pony, or even than walking. The litter was not there for him, as the person for whom it was there had made and was making quite clear.

  “Time was, me coney-boy, when I could stride a cob with the best of them, yesindeed, ride all day, frolic and dance and make love all night. But those days are gone, yesindeed. Gone before you were hatched, my chick. Or didn’t they hatch on your world? Bear live, do they?”

  A gust of laughter took the withered little creature in the corner of the litter. It was day, early day, now. But he could still be no more certain if it were very old man or very old woman there, buried in the mound of furs and fleeces; save that it had been addressed as ma’am.

  “You listening, Jonny? Awake, are you? Good. Not that it makes much difference at me age, there I was, babbling to myself for hours, thinking you were listening, all the while you were dreaming away, but I went on babbling, anyway. We’ll stop by and by for a bite to eat and something hot and sweet to drink. Now, then, must mind me manners—

  “Ma’am Anna, that’s who I am. Call me Queen of the North People, if you like; call me the Tribe-Hag, if it likes you better. One way you look at it, I pays taxes to their nasty, priggy little Lordships the High-Born Syndics of Peramis, Hathor, Sartis and Drogue, for the pleasure of me folks’ wandering through what the stiff-necks like to think is their territory. Look at it another way, they pays me tribute for not raiding into their borders. What it amounts to, nowadays, want to know: We exchange presents. Eee, the folly of folks!”

  She winked, tittered, flung up her ancient paws. Then, with a mutter, drew a horn whistle from somewhere under her coverings, and blew on it. Almost at once a head thrust into the litter, and a hearty voice said, “Well, our ma’am, have you finished seducing this young cock-dragon? And can the rest of us, poor respectable nomads as we are, pause and rest?”

  The old woman cackled and gestured. A horn blew, voices cried out, the litter (carried by two fat-bodied, short-legged animals that might have been small horses or large ponies) halted. And over the hot breakfast which presently made its way into the palanquin, to be divided between matriarch and guest, Jon-Joras reflected on what he had heard; for he had not been altogether asleep all during the ride, merely too tired to reply or comment.

  The raid had not been planned to free him, although that had been part of it. The raid had not been planned to pick up a dozen or so likely young women, although that had been part of it, too. (The women had shrieked and struck their captors and engaged in some semi-ritual wailing until cuffed into silence, but they seemed to have accepted their change in fortune serenely enough after not very long.)

  “That Hue seems to think that nothing but what he wants, counts, me coney,” old Ma’am Anna had complained. “Well, now. How stupid do he think the Gentlemen are? They know that something doesn’t smell right, yesindeed. Sooner or later, they’re bound to come looking. Now, we North People, we mind our own business. And we do not want any troops and armies coming and poking around. Wars, you know, me boy, wars are catchy things.”

  Boiled down, then, the raid had been intended to reestablish the status-quo before the city-states went to arms in order to re-establish it themselves. And, the dragons, she had said, were dead—dead in their enclosures behind the pit. Pausing with a piece of wild honeycomb in his fingers, Jon-Joras asked about that.

  “How were the dragons killed, Ma’am Anna? I heard no gunfire. No one could have gotten a good shot by the torchlight, anyway. Besides, they were all marked wrong.”

  She nodded, supped noisily from her bowl. After a moment, she wiped her toothless mouth, said, “That’s another thing, you see. Hue and his rogues. Rogue drags can be as bothersome as soldieries, yesindeed. I daresay he intends they all go downriver, towards the hunting country. I suppose he does his best to drive them so. But they don’t, me cockerel, no, they don’t always stay drove…

  “How were they killed? Why, we poisoned them. Never mind what poison. Leave at least one of us be able to eat with an easy mind.” She bent over in a spasm of silent laughter.

  Breakfast over, the day quite on its way and the sun warmer, Ma’am Anna had the curtains of the litter drawn back and relinquished a layer or two of her coverings. The signal horn sounded, and the nomads got on their way once more. Far off in the bosky distance a faint smudge showed in the air on the horizon. The black stones of the sinister, alien Kar-chee castle would not burn, but just about everything the outlaw Doghunters had carried into it was flammable.

  “How did Hue get his scar, do you know?”

  Her wrinkled lips came together in a pout. She shook her head. “That was bad, yesindeed. Someone with an -ix to the tail of his name—this was when Hue was just small of size—decided he didn’t find him meek enough. Maybe was drunk, too. However it was, he picked him up by the scruff and tossed him in with a dragon-cockerel that he happened to have around. The cockerel was bigger than Hue was… I don’t altogether blame the man. Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them.”

  It was not a barn, exactly, which was burning back there. Her eyes followed his and, evidently, her thoughts, too. “Do they have dragons where you come from, coney?

  “No. No, I suppose not. Because you never had no bloody Karches, did you, then? Lucky you. Did you know that they turn into Karches in the night-times? Yesindeed. So you be careful, hear me now, in wandering off in the dark. Particularly if we gets near unto The Bosky. Fierce, terribly fierce, is them Bosky drags.”

  Jon-Joras, torn between his desire to hear more of this new aspect of the legend—the dragon as were-Kar-chee—and his desire to hear more of the almost unknown land beyond the official territories of the city-states, decided that if he let her talk he might well hear of both. Which he did.

  The nomads apparently knew very well that the dragons were not Kar-chee. How Hue and Hue’s people had formed the notion that they were, Jon-Joras could not guess and didn’t now try. The notion that at certain times and in certain places the dragons shifted their shapes into those of the long since departed Kar-chee was perhaps, however, not much more scientific. If at all.

  “… they even changes their smell, me cockerel,” old Ma‘am Anna hissed, wide-eyed in emphasis.

  “I know how dragons smell, but how do… how did the—”

  “The damned and bloody Karches? You knows that, too. You was in their castle for sure enough, yes indeed.”

  Was that faint and alien odor that he had noticed, then, indeed that of the castle-keeping Kar-chee? Faint, faint, so very faint—yet still so distinct. The thought alone was capable of evoking it. Could it have lingered all these centuries? He could not say, could not begin, even, to conjecture. And, as for The Bosky—

  Time and time again nomad bands had desired to graze their flocks on the rich and untouched grasses there. But the dragons were so incomparably fiercer in that region that it was long since any herdsmen had even thought of trying. Too, in times past, free farmers—individually and in groups and leagues—had endeavoured either to settle in The Bosky or at at least to pass through it in search of regions where the Syndics’ writs did not run. Where farm land might stay farm land and not become a target-alley or a parade-ground, where potatoes might stay where planted until harvested and not be dug up and trampled into muck because they had impinged on dragon ground. That curious and strange loving hate existing between hunters and hunted… Off, then, their gear and baggage laden aboard crude wagons and on pack-horses, did they
have any; or bending beneath the weight themselves, did they have none, the free-farmers had set off for finding places where they might be free indeed and farmers indeed and need nevermore be “dirty doghunters” save on their own account.

  “Some come back quicker than they went, young outworlder. It made them content to suffer what they’d suffered in discontent but where the dragons don’t fight unless they’re coaxed or goaded. I says, ‘It made them…’ What did? Why to see how terrible them awful Bosky drags tore up them as went before them. In their blood they saw them, yesindeed, mere bones and shreds,” Ma’am Anna sighed.

  Jon-Joras caught at a word. “‘Some’ came back, you say—?”

  “You mean, and what’s of the others? Isn’t it clear? Them as was found torn and scattered, was them that never come back.”

  He frowned and mused. There was nothing utterly impossible in this account, nothing of the historical absurdity of confusing Kar-chee with dragon nor of the physical impossibility of the one turning into the other and back again, so. But there remained one considerable question which alone put the whole matter into doubt.

  “Are the dragons any bigger or any different there than here?”

  “Nope.” Ma’am Anna smacked her gums. “Just fiercer, like I say.”

  “But…” And this was it: “Why should they be fiercer there? I mean, with no one to hunt them and bother them, you’d think they’d be less fierce, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she said, with inflexible logic; “because I knows they be more fierce. As to why, hee hum, old as I am and not fit for much, rather than go and maybe find out and be made into salad meat, by your leave, me coney, I’ll stay over here and in ignorance.”

  And there the matter rested.