Rogue Dragon

by Avram Davidson

  They were due to meet up with the main horde at about noon; and, at about noon, they did. The camp was, like a Gentleman’s seat, a small city-state of its own. Tents and lean-tos dotted the area for about a mile, the small animals from which the fleeces evidently came milled and bleated, and ponies by the thousands—so it seemed—grazed in hobbles. And in the center was the great circular tent which was the Ma’am’s capitol.

  “Mutton!” she directed, as she was being lifted down.

  “I want me fat mutton—grilled and crisp and chopped fine!”

  “Yes, our Ma’am.”

  “And tomorrow I want the flocks taken up to the white stony brook—that was all burnt over a while back, should be nice, fresh grazing.”

  “Yes, our Ma’am.”

  “Tomorrow. Not today. Today I want the children to go up there instead. Have ’em bring all the buckets and baskets—there’ll be good berrying there.”

  “Yes, our Ma’am.”

  They set her down on a pile of fleeces and blankets raised off the floor, propped her up with pillows.

  “Did Cuthy beg Brun’s pardon, publicly, like I said?”

  “He did, our Ma’am.”

  “Paid him twelve goats, too?”

  “Twelve goats, our Ma’am. He wanted to include a wether, and Brun wouldn’t have it, but the Elders said a goat was a goat, so he took it, rather than do without.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. There’s many a buck with stones that does the nannies no good; this way he won’t have to wonder… Teach Cuthy to leave Brun’s woman alone. All right! All right! Get out, now! Stop vexing me old head with all your questions. Bring enough mutton for the outworld boy, too. Come sit… of whatever way is comfortable for you… over by me. Now, then—”

  She took his hand. “We’ll be here long enough for you to mend. What do you think on doing, once you can ride. again?” He said that he thought he’d rather not ride again at all, asked if she couldn’t send a messenger for a flyer to take him back to Peramis. “Ah, me cockerel, but isn’t that part of the question? What do you think on doing, once you’re back in Peramis?”

  Seeing that he was still not understanding her, she explained in detail. What did he plan to say about things? The rogue dragon… the mysterious, secretive Kar-chee castle and what it contained… the nomad raid… He began to catch her drift; asked what she thought he should say.

  Slowly, the old head nodded.

  “That’s the point. Yesindeed, that’s the point. You see, me coney, few things are ever simple. If you go back and talk free, then the wasp’s-nest is stirred up for sure. The armies come out. We don’t want that, for our own reasons. And when the armies are out of the States, what’s then? Riots, I hear, in Peramis. Put down by the army. Maybe the Dogrobbers would just as soon sacrifice their tricks off in the woods, for a chance to burn things up.”

  He had to agree that it was not simple. Certainly, he could not forget what had been done to the son of Aëlorix, his former host, to whose salt he assuredly owed something. Certainly, he could not deny that the outlaws had just grievances. More: they, too, had been his hosts. Finding him wandering near their secret place, they had been justified in taking him prisoner; but they had treated him with kindliness, once he was safe inside.

  “Is Hue still alive?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The men told me they saw him go down, before they had to withdraw. But they’re not sure he wasn’t in shape to get up again. Why?”

  He told her why. “‘They shall all be killed, every one—in the egg, and out…’”

  “When things reach such a stage,” Jon-Joras said, “the right which is based on having been wronged becomes a wrong in itself.”

  The old woman stooped her chin upon her hands. She sighed. “Well… Well… We have to think. Both of us. But not now. Here they are with the mutton. If there is one thing I don’t have to puzzle about, it’s mutton,” she said, contentedly. “I like it fat. And I like it crisp.”

  From time to time in the next few days, Jon-Joras thought about his forcibly neglected duties. He knew that Por-Paulo would not blame him or think less of him; besides, the Hunt Company was experienced enough to fill the gap well enough in making arrangements. Meanwhile, there lay open before him the life of the nomad encampment, utterly strange to him except as a half-forgotten paragraph in half-forgotten books. In a way it was far freer than any life he had ever known, but it was subject nonetheless to the sway of law. The tribesmen elected their council of elders and over the elders was the old queen, Ma’am Anna, who ruled them all as the benevolent semi-despotic matriarch of a family. But even old Anna had to go where the grass was green and the water was sweet; even she could not prevent storm and snow and flood and disease.

  She gave Jon-Joras a pony, as casually as she might give a child a sweet; the tribe had plenty of ponies, after all (she said), and she could not burden her litter with him forever. He thanked her for the gift—somewhat fearfully, remembering how sore he had been from his first ride—and somewhat reluctantly, realizing that this probably meant he was not going back to Peramis in the immediate future. But there was nothing he could really do about it… except make the most of it.

  He learned how to ride the shaggy little beast, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence and enjoyment, over the low swelling hills and flatlands fresh with new herbage; only a fleecy pad for a saddle, only a braided grass rope for a bridle, the sweetsmelling wind in his face instead of the strong musty odor of sheep which hung around the camp site.

  Sheep and shepherds alike fell behind him as, food in his saddle-sack and water in his leather bottle, he set as his goal some distant landmark—a wooded hilltop, a pond glittering in the sun, a valley opening wide in welcome—and headed for it. No one, least of all Ma’am Anna, seemed concerned about his possibly not returning, any more than his earlier hosts, the outlaws, had been. He was after all as bound by his limited knowledge of the terrain as by the encircling high black walls around the castle of the swarming, conquering, and now-vanished Kar-chee.

  Both Jon-Joras and the tribesmen, however, were in this guilty of one mutual mistake. Both realized that he did not know enough about the countryside to escape successfully. Neither realized that he knew little enough about it to get lost successfully. But he did.

  Born and raised upon the infinitely controlled planet which was M.M. beta, where everything was so complex as to be simple, so controlled, so subdued, so organized, that even a blind man could hardly lose his way; Jon-Joras—despite theoretically knowing better—did not consider the possibility that one wooded hill, one pond, one valley, might well look just the same to him as another. He had always found his way back successfully before. If by nothing else, he guided himself automatically by the almost tidal regularity of the flocks and herds as they drifted back, campwards, as the day drew to a close.

  He never thought to ask, and no one thought to inform him, that the lands towards which he rode that day had been so thoroughly grazed that the flocks and herds had been diverted from them, sent elsewhere. Once outside the perimeter of the camp Jon-Joras rode through empty fields -but this meant nothing to him. He noted the brook to leftwards, and headed in its general direction. But much broken land lay between them, and the source of the stream was in one of the many declivities he was bound to avoid. So when, at last, he finally saw a brook to his left, he did not realize that it was not the same brook but another and a farther one. Guiding himself by its course, eventually he turned the pony’s head and began (so he thought) to ride back towards the encampment.

  The cooling air and the still-empty landscape told him of his escape. But it was an escape as useless as it was inadvertent, one of which he could make no use. He had no idea of where he was, none of where he wanted to go, and (he realized with some surprise) little of even where he wanted to be. There on the hilltop in the sallow light of lowering day, M.M. B seemed infinitely far off in space and time and reality, Peramis
was the mere thin fabric of a dream, and the encampment of the tribe little more than a setting from a 3D drama or travelogue.

  He sighed. After a moment he began riding his mount in a slow circle on the rise of ground. He saw nothing and nothing and yet nothing. Sunshine and clouds wheeled in counter-circles, slotted shafts of light broke through the gathering dusk, and in one such thrust of brightness he saw three small figures riding along far away and below. He thumped the pony in the ribs and rode towards them.

  They were long in hearing him, indeed, it was only after he ceased to call after them that they turned around, perhaps having heard the sound of the hooves… perhaps not even having precisely heard them… but become somehow aware of… something. However it was, they turned, drew reign, awaited him.

  They were three in number—one was an older man, one was a younger man, one was a woman. To be more exact, a girl. To be even more exact, the girl who had repulsed his assistance in the mob scene before the Hall of Court… the girl whom he had seen and who had fled from him in the woods between the fatal coming of the great rogue dragon and his capture by the outlaw Doghunters.

  She had said something upon seeing him now and, obviously, recognizing him; something swift and low-voiced to her companions. And then for a long while, all four of them riding through the long, slow twilight over the empty plains, she said nothing, but slumped her chin into the blue cloak whose folds enveloped her.

  The older man was a swart, stocky, grizzle-bearded fellow, his knees stuck out at angles from the sides of his thin gaunt horse. He wore a long cloak of the same blue as the girl, but, cast half aside, it revealed a garb of greasy buckskin beneath. Gold rings glittered in his hairy ears. His male companion was something else altogether—young, slender, upright and trim… elegant was the word which occurred to Jon-Joras. His tunic was Gentleman’s white, his trousers the elaborate embroidered affair worn on festivals by tribesmen, and his cloak—arranged with elaborate neatness so as to leave his arms free—was fastened across his chest with a silver chain and clasp. A bracelet of gold chased-work encircled a wrist held out as stiff and proud as if it bore a hawk.

  At length the elder cleared his throat and spat. He scratched himself reflectively. “I’ve been thinking on what you said before, Henners,” he observed. “And I can’t see that I agree, no, not one bit. There is nothing at all wrong with the triolet.”

  “Nonsense, Trond,” Henners said, vigorously. “It is archaic, contrived, artificial, jejeune—and anything else you like. It altogether lacks the simplicity and directness of the couplet, neither does it lend itself to amplified assonance and alliteration.”

  Trond screwed his face up into a truly hideous squint, compounded with a frown. “But the couplet”—the last word exploded into an enormous eructation—“the couplet is so monotonous!”

  And so they rode on, as the air turned blue and the sky went purple and the first tiny stars appeared, discussing different modes and meters of poetry; and finally the bright and dancing light of a fire shone before them. And another, and another. Voices haled them, figures rose and crowded around. The girl dismounted, someone took her horse, she vanished from Jon-Joras’s sight.

  “Fellow poets,” said Henners, gesturing, “allow me to present our guest, one Jon-Joras by name, an outworlder and sometime semi-captive of those coarse persons, the Northern Tribe. I think we may be of some small assistance to him in the matter of getting him back to a state… and I think we will find him not ungenerous, hem, hem, in the matter of expenses. Well! Are we not to eat and drink before falling to the making of new verses and rhymes, the chief end of such portion of mankind as dare deem itself civilized?”

  Invitations were at once shouted, the guest was assisted from his pony and led to a seat by the largest of the fires, where a pair of lambs were grilling on a spit over a bed of coals. Someone thrust a goblet into his hand, of some drink which managed to taste both sweet and acid at the same time; and strong, and smelling of honey.

  “First verse!” a voice close to him called. Others took it up. “First verse! Guest! Outworlder! First verse!”

  The realization that he was to compose, instant and impromptu, a short poem, found Jon-Joras with an empty mind. Empty, that is, of everything except the feeling that there was something odd about the lambs which were becoming supper. He held up his hand, the crowd became silent. He spoke:

  “Three rode forth, and four returned

  When supper grilled and fire burned.

  A mystery they found, ere sleep:

  Whence came lambs, when there’s no sheep!”

  The briefest of quiets followed the recitation. Then it was swallowed up in a burst of laughter. Someone pounded him on the back. Someone poured more drink into his golden goblet. And someone on the other side of the fire, whose face he could not distinguish, started a reply.

  “Such miracles you find, our guest,

  Along with drink and food and rest.

  The truth we tell, although it grieves:

  The simple fact is—we are thieves!”

  VI

  Poets there were on MM beta, though mostly employing verse forms so involved and elaborate as to make the triolet seem simpler than the couplet. And there were thieves there, too, although even the apprentice ones would scarcely bother with anything as small as a lamb. Poetic thieves, however, or thieving poets—this was something new to Jon-Joras. He suspected it might be something new (or, at any rate, something different) to students of societal set-ups throughout all the teeming galaxy.

  And so, there by the leaping flames, he leaned and he listened—amused, amazed, disapproving, entranced—while Henners recited (in couplets and quatrains) his exploits in removing the jewels and gold and silver plate of His Serene Supremacy the Chairman of the Board of Syndics of Drogue, while the latter sat at meat in his high chamber.

  With guests.

  He was mildly annoyed at the distraction of having a voice break in on the recitation… at first. But when the words sank in, he forgot Henners and all his works.

  “She’s a mean one, that baggage… isn’t she?”

  Jon-Joras, turning his head and seeing Trond, face reddened by the fire light, had somehow no doubt who was meant by “she.”

  “Who is she?” he asked, half-whispering. Trond jerked his head to the left, moved off, and Jon-Joras followed him. Henner’s voice was still audible when they stopped at last, but the words could no longer be made out. A fat and gibbous moon rode the cloud-flecked skies and afforded plenty of light to the park-like glade where the thieves’ jungle was set up.

  “Who is she?” Trond repeated the. question, sat himself on a moss-covered tree trunk lying where it had fallen in some long-ago storm. He did not answer the question, said, instead, “She claims you’re following her…”

  Speechless indignation followed by indignant speech. She claimed that he was following her? If the truth was anything at all like that, it was strictly the other way around. He told the older man of finding her in the mob scene in Peramis when the Doghunter had been convicted of killing the Gentleman, of his own attempt to help her and how it had been repulsed—almost rabidly.

  “That could have been an accident, our meeting the first time. She couldn’t have known I was going to be there, I certainly didn’t know she was going to be there. And as for the second time—” Abruptly, he stopped. Did Trond or any of his fellows know about the Kar-chee castle and what was being done there? And, assuming that he and they didn’t, did Jon-Joras want them to? Quick reflection decided him that he didn’t. He went on, a bit lamely, “—and the second time I was just lost in the woods, I’d gotten separated from the people I was with, and I was picked up by some Doghunters.

  “I had no notion she’d be wandering in the same woods. And this last time, I—”

  “You got lost,” said Trond, nodding, expressionlessly. “Again.”

  The night was warm, but the young man felt his face go warm. “It may sound like an unlikely coincid
ence,” he said, defensively, “but you have to remember that I’m an outworlder… a stranger… And besides—how could I have known that she—and you—would be riding along at just that time.”

  Trond grunted. He produced an oddly-shaped piece of wood, thrust it into a pouch and did something to it, blew on the end of a stick he’d brought with him from the fire, and, when it glowed red, thrust the device into his mouth and touched it with the ember end. Odd little noises, then a cloud of smoke… and another… the acrid odor made Jon-Joras cough a bit—and then he remembered. Tobacco! Its use had not followed mankind outward to the stars, and even here on its native world it was supposed to be all but extinct. Where had Trond gotten the ancient herb? For surely the Poets cultivated no crops! Most likely he had stolen it.

  “Well,” said Trond, on a prolonged note, with a puff, “I’m just telling you what she says. I could think of a lot of ways it might be true… if I was minded to… but I’m not. Why not? Because. Like I say. She’s a mean one, that baggage. As the triolet says—”

  But Jon-Joras did not at that moment want to know what the triolet said. He grasped Trond’s knee, and repeated, “Who is she? Who?‘

  Trond puffed at his pipe a moment more. “Her name,” he said, “is Lora.”

  Lora. “No… It doesn’t mean a thing to—”

  “Maybe her father’s name might mean a thing to you.”

  “Her father?”

  Trond nodded. His pipe made a gurgling sound. “Yes. Tall, thin, ukh-looking man. Name of Hue.”

  Away in the night Henner’s voice ceased. There were cheers and applause. Jon-Joras, feeling stunned, feeling stupid, said, “But she hates me. Her father doesn’t hate me.”

  Trond made a noise which might have been a grunt or a chuckle. “Don’t fool yourself. Of course he hates you. You’re an outworlder, aren’t you? Well, figure it out. According to him, according to her, if you—all of you—didn’t come here to hunt, the whole system would collapse. It doesn’t pay for itself, that’s for sure. Not hate you? He’s just older, has more control over his feelings, that’s all.”