The Dragon, the Earl ,and the Troll

by Gordon R. Dickson

  It was delightful. Jim remembered how, when he had first attempted flight in his dragon body, he had been completely won over by the magnificent feeling of climbing swiftly through the air, soaring or diving several hundred feet, essentially in free fall. But this was even more marvelous. Drifting—at probably better than over a hundred miles an hour, but it still felt like drifting—above the black-and-white landscape.

  "No sign of the troll," said Jim out loud, without thinking, looking down at the snow blanket with nothing but an occasional animal track across it, slipping swiftly by beneath them. He tried to envision the sort of tracks that would be made by the great, naked splay feet of the troll, huge toes ending in the dents of their claws.

  "That's because they're all under the snow," said Hob-One, unexpectedly, beside him.

  Jim turned to look at the hobgoblin. He was riding, apparently upon a single thin waft of smoke. Jim glanced down past his legs and saw that he was doing the same thing.

  "Under the snow?" he echoed. "I was talking about the troll."

  "So was I," said Hob-One. He added darkly, "I don't like trolls. Or dragons. Or nightshades, or sandmirks, or big kitchen ladies with large knives—"

  "How do you mean, under the snow?" asked Jim. "Even if the snow was deep enough to hide one—"

  "Oh, they don't just lie down anyplace and wait for the snow to cover them, my Lord," said Hob-One. "They pick places where the snow will blow up into a deep drift and lie down there. The cold doesn't bother them, of course—or anything else; and they can stay there as long as they like, until somebody comes by and then they jump up out of the snow and grab him—grab and eat him. Usually, of course, it's just an innocent deer or rabbit. But it could be anybody—even a hobgoblin like me!"

  "Well, there shouldn't be any around here to do that to you," said Jim. "The castle troll says he's kept this territory clear of other trolls for eighteen hundred years."

  "He may say that," said Hob-One. "But there's hundreds of them down there. I saw them when they were still waiting to be covered up with snow. That was when I first came looking for you, and it was still snowing."

  "Hundreds of them?" said Jim. "You can't be right."

  "Yes, I really am, my Lord," said Hob-One earnestly. "I know trolls when I see them, and there were at least hundreds. At least."

  Jim felt a sinking sensation inside him.

  "If there are that many out here why doesn't the castle troll know about it?" he said. "He was very firm about keeping his territory clear all these years."

  "I don't know," said Hob. "But then, I'm just a hobgoblin."

  "Why would they be there?" asked Jim.

  "I don't know, my Lord," said Hob-One.

  Jim caught himself on the verge of saying something sharp about the fact that Hob-One didn't seem to know much about anything.

  He reined himself in. After all, he told himself, the little fellow was just what he said he was. Somebody who spent days and nights inside a kitchen chimney could not be expected to know a great deal about the rest of the world, even if he did go out occasionally. Also, checking his small burst of temper over Hob had reminded him of Angie's words after they had left Geronde and Brian. As usual, what Angie told him came back to grind away at him later on.

  She was quite right, of course. He had been taking advantage of Brian's innocence and suggestibility about the vision—and that was not a good thing to do to your best friend in any century. Well, hopefully, Brian would tell people he had forgotten whatever there might have been to remember about the vision; and the whole matter would soon also be forgotten by everyone else. Still, Jim made a promise to himself that sometime in the future he would find some way of making up his misuse of Brian, somehow. Though he had no idea how.

  "We're almost there!" Hob-One's voice interrupted his thoughts.

  He looked ahead and saw a clearing in the trees, and there in the clearing were the walls and towers of Malencontri. He heaved a sigh of relief; and then remembered that the castle did not promise relief, but a problem waiting solution. He still had whatever trouble Secoh was waiting to drop on him.

  He thrust worry from his mind for the moment. Now that he had the castle in sight, he really began to appreciate the speed with which they had been traveling. The castle seemed to be rocketing toward him.

  "Down we go!" Hob-One sang almost happily; and they plunged into a chimney that Jim assumed was the one leading down to the serving room in the tower, right next to the hall of Malencontri. The serving room was where the dishes were brought and attempted to be kept warm from the kitchen; since the kitchen in most castles was outside the main castle buildings, and very often a wooden structure. Fire was the great fear of those who lived in castles and used open flame to cook by.

  There was a flash of darkness around him, and he suddenly found himself coming to a halt with both heels jarring on a floor right in front of a fireplace with a comfortable fire burning in it.

  But it was not the serving room nor any other room in the castle that he recognized.

  It was the interior of Carolinus's little cottage at the Tinkling Water, some snow-clad miles away; and it was Carolinus himself who was facing him, fiercely, in a room lit only by the dancing shadows of the firelight, which made strange advancing and retreating areas of darkness in the further parts of the room, and a surprisingly bright glow from the upside-down fish-bowl shape of the magician's scrying glass.

  "Don't ask me!" snapped Carolinus. "It's not your fault; but I can't help you."

  Chapter 13

  Jim stared at the older man. Carolinus looked the same as usual, in a red robe, with the stains that always seemed to accumulate on one of his robes after a day or so; whether from food, some by-product of magic-making, or some strange other reason. But there were lines of strain around his eyes and Jim was not deceived by the fierceness. This was not Carolinus being his normal irritable self; it was Carolinus covering up something by pretending to be his normal irritable self.

  "But I didn't come asking for help," said Jim. "At least not in the sense I think you meant it. I've got things to tell you and things to talk over with you; and actually I was headed to talk with Secoh first; but I'm just as glad I ran into you instead. I suppose you had me diverted to here."

  "That's right!" said Carolinus.

  "Well, to start off with," said Jim, "let me tell you something. There's an army of trolls surrounding the Earl's castle."

  "He knows. I've told him," said a familiar voice; and Aargh came out of one of the shifting patches of shadow into the light, looking half again as big as normal, and almost demonlike himself with his yellow eyes in the candle glow and the light from the scrying glass.

  "Did you see them?" demanded Jim.

  "They were already under the snow," said Aargh, "but I smelled them. The whole forest there reeks of troll; and my nose is not a troll's nose, nor a deer's nose, nor a hedgehog's nose. I would smell even one of them, even under a foot of snowdrift."

  "But Mnrogar didn't actually talk as if he knew about them," said Jim. "And it was only early the next day in the morning that it stopped snowing; so if they were going to be covered by snow they had to be covered by that time."

  "They were," said Aargh.

  "Then why didn't Mnrogar act as if he knew they were out there?" said Jim. "The only thing he seemed concerned about was this troll he thinks is upstairs in the castle among the guests."

  "They were outside his territory," said Aargh. "Also, under the castle down there, unless the wind was blowing directly down his tunnel—and even then—he might not be able to smell them at that distance."

  "They were there when you left us and went out?" asked Jim. "You got through and past them all right?"

  Aargh laughed his silent laugh.

  "They are not shoulder to shoulder under the snow," he said. "They neither love nor trust each other, those trolls. There was more than enough space between them for even a slow-moving animal to get through, with luck, let alone
me. Besides, what would one of them gain by leaping out of the snow at me? Only his own death. They're there for another reason."

  Jim turned on Carolinus.

  "They're after the castle, the Earl and the guests inside?" he said to Carolinus.

  "No," said Carolinus. His faded blue eyes burned fiercely under his white eyebrows. "They're after Mnrogar's territory. Only one of them can get it—in single combat with Mnrogar—but whether he wins or loses; whether he can hold it, after he has won, from other challengers among the other trolls, makes no difference. The very fact that they are there to try can be a thing the Dark Powers have been seeking for some time—an excuse to have you stripped of all your magical powers and leave you defenseless before them. And, as I said, in this, finally, I can't help you. I must stand aside. Because you're my apprentice I have to stand aside."

  Jim blinked at him.

  "I don't understand," he said after a second. "What does stripping me of my magical powers mean? And what's all this about the Dark Powers? As I understood it, once the castle was blessed—"

  "The castle is safe," said Carolinus. "All in it are safe, even after the Bishop leaves. Only Mnrogar and you are at risk here."

  "Well, with the people in the castle safe, that much is a relief," said Jim, letting out a breath. "You mean, the trolls won't attack the castle all together, like an army?"

  "Not they!" said Aargh. "They would only fight together if all your armored men set out as a body to hunt them down, and cornered them—or else all that has always been true of a troll is true no longer and the sun and moon are gone."

  "Then we don't have to worry about that either," said Jim. "Now, what's this about me being in danger and what have the Dark Powers to do with it, then?"

  He was back talking to Carolinus. Carolinus frowned.

  "You still don't seem to understand what I've tried to tell you so many times," said Carolinus, "about the balance between History and Chance—how that balance must always be maintained and the Dark Powers are always at work to upset it; while we, the magicians, have been on guard to keep them from doing so. That is the way of all things always—to preserve a balance.

  "To begin with, Jim, the Dark Powers had no idea you could be too strong for them. They didn't expect you at all. Then you not only came from somewhere else, but with knowledge beyond their understanding. Sometime since, they've learned better; and they've been maneuvering ever since to find a way to turn your own strength against you. Now they've found it."

  Jim was silent for a moment. He knew the word for what Carolinus was talking about. It was called technology—twentieth-century technology. The things he had taken for granted in the world that he and Angie had come from, the equivalent of six hundred years and more ahead of this fourteenth-century one in which he now stood. Carolinus had been right in what he had tried to tell Jim almost from the beginning—that magic was an art. Little twentieth-century ordinary things that Jim knew about mechanics, about medicine—for that matter, about people and society itself—had made the magic that he developed and learned into something that was unique, as every true magician's magic was unique to himself or herself. And that had allowed him to solve problems in ways that were not even suspected in this medieval time around him.

  "I don't see—" he was beginning.

  "No," said Carolinus, almost gently, "and you were probably not to be blamed for it. Do you remember when you used something you called hypnotism, as part of your magic to control the sorcerer Ecotti and the French King, long enough for you and your friends to escape and cross the Channel back here to England?"

  "Yes," said Jim, puzzled by this apparent change in topic.

  "And you remember, as a result I had to match myself in a magician's test with a B-class oriental magician who claimed that what you called 'hypnotism' was part of oriental magic; and that you had not been properly taught it by a magician qualified in oriental magic?"

  "Of course!" said Jim. Carolinus had actually won handily in that encounter, though at the time he was despondent and the winning raised his spirits only temporarily. At the time, however, he had given Jim to understand that it was no real contest; since he had been matched against a mere B-class magician, instead of someone of his own very high rank and skill.

  "—So," he was saying now, "you remember my opponent's name, of course. It was Son Won Phon; and he's been concerning himself with your status ever since—gathering a respectable number of minds among the world's magicians who tend to agree with him."

  "You mean," said Jim, "he's holding a grudge?"

  "Certainly not!" said Carolinus. "Magickians don't hold grudges!"

  He coughed.

  "That is," he went on, "qualified magickians, those above that C rank that you hold. No, the truth is he's simply somewhat conservative in his views. Take his attitude toward the transmutation of ordinary minerals into precious metals, for example—but come to think of it, never mind. You don't have the background; and we don't want to waste time talking about that just now. In fact, thinking of talking, we should do so in absolute privacy. Let me ask for a little assistance."

  He held up one long finger in mid-air, and a faint musical tinkle came from the tip of it. They all stood for a moment, and then there was an answering tinkle from the shadows in one corner of the room; and what could only be described as a very beautiful winged fairy, not much larger than a hummingbird, flew out of the shadows and hovered, her wings merely wafting the air, as with one tiny hand she took hold of the tip of Carolinus's finger.

  "Ah, T.B.," said Carolinus. "I hope I didn't bother you at a moment when you were busy with something important."

  T.B. tinkled at him.

  "Good of you to say so," rejoined Carolinus. "I have a favor to ask. It's necessary that the three of us discuss a matter under conditions where we can't possibly be overheard. Could you transport the three of us to you know where?"

  The little fairy tinkled.

  "Thank you," said Carolinus. "We appreciate it highly. Good of you to do this."

  The fairy tinkled again.

  "Not at all, not at all," said Carolinus. "I'm fully aware of the favor you're doing us. Why, if you were to do it for any magickian who asks, your island would be overpopulated all the time. I know that very well; and I appreciate your making a special case for us. Any time, then, whenever you're ready."

  Instantly, they were in a small clearing surrounded by some very large, tropical-looking trees, with heavy leaves as big as elephant ears and a soft green sward under their feet. It appeared to be broad, clear daylight above the trees, but they and their leaves were thick enough so that it was pleasantly dim at ground level where Jim stood. T.B. tinkled again and disappeared.

  A passing individual, rather piratically dressed in a green shirt and ragged gray trousers, with a red sash around his waist holding two pistols and a cutlass, tipped his black straw hat politely to Carolinus. Carolinus gave him a distant nod in return.

  "I smell salt air," said Aargh, lifting his nose to the faint breeze that was winding its way among the thick tree trunks.

  "Naturally," said Carolinus, "the sea's quite near by. But, to more important matters. Jim, pay attention to me now!"

  "I have been, ever since I got to you," said Jim.

  "Tut, tut," said Carolinus. "Temper! Strive to control it, Jim. Take your cue from me. Be pleasant and calm at all times."

  This last statement left Jim so speechless, that he evidently gave a quite satisfying impression of having taken to heart the idea of showing the sort of calmness Carolinus wanted him to display.

  "Now, where was I?" said Carolinus. "Oh, yes. As I say, Son Won Phon has gathered a number of like minds in the magicians to his point of view. Without going into the laws, by-laws and precedents on which he rests the conclusion, his point of view, simply expressed, is this: you are yourself a potentially disturbing factor to both History and Chance; and we should put it completely beyond your power to be so. If we cannot send you back wher
e you came from, we should find some other way of rendering you completely helpless—we, the magicians, that is."

  "You'd actually send us back?" said Jim, excitement suddenly leaping upward within him. If the magicians sent him back, surely they would send Angie back with him, and that would solve all their problems. He and Angie would be back in the twentieth century; and the fourteenth century on this world would be undisturbed and happy—well, happy in a relative sense—again. Undisturbed and happy, that was, if Son Won Phon was correct. Actually, Jim didn't think he was.

  "What makes him so sure I'm a disturbance to History and Chance?" Jim asked.

  "I was just starting to tell you, back in my cottage," said Carolinus, "when I realized it should properly be explained where no one else could hear."

  "Someone like Son Won Phon, I suppose?" Jim said.

  "Nonsense!" said Carolinus. "Magickians don't—but, even if they did, it'd be impossible for them to overhear our talk here as they could at my cottage."

  "And where are we?" growled Aargh.

  "Never you mind!" said Carolinus. "This is something wolves aren't supposed to know."

  He glared at Jim suddenly.

  "—Or apprentices either, for that matter!"

  Actually, Jim had a fairly good notion of where they were. They were at the Island of Lost Boys in James Barrie's play Peter Pan. But the prospect of himself and Angie back in the twentieth century glittered so strongly in his mind that where they were did not matter.

  "But why can we be sure nobody can hear?" asked Jim.

  "Because what's here is fixed for all time," said Carolinus. "What you see only exists in writing and a stage play. This is neither, but the story the play tells. It's absolutely unchangeable. Past history is also unchangeable. That fact is why Son Won Phon's attitude is so—"