The Dragon, the Earl ,and the Troll

by Gordon R. Dickson

"Yes, that's right, Ned," said Jim. "Because it's blown a different way, I won't need you to blow it. You just put it to your mouth and I'll make the horn blow itself. What I want you to do is ride out on a horse in front of a knight in black armor, put the horn to your lips, let it blow itself, and then sit still there while some matters are announced; then, when I tell you, turn around and ride back past the knight, and behind a tent from which you both came. Do you think you can do that all right?"

  "I'll surely try, m'Lord," said Ned, half stammering—but, as Jim noticed, apparently more from excitement than from doubt of his ability to do the task successfully.

  Jim's ear, sharpened since the matter of his singing to the other guests at the Earl's party, was barely aware of the actual speech of Ned, which the usual magic or whatever of this world normally turned into modern English for him. It seemed he was catching a faint hint of what might have been even a twentieth-century Somerset shire accent behind the actual sounds Ned was making, as if he was speaking in a broader dialect than that of Tom Huntsman. A slight emphasis on the s, sounding it almost like a z, seemed just at the edge of the young man's voice.

  "Well, good," said Jim. "I'll count on you then. Now, in a short while I'll be leaving here; but I'll be back later this day to get you and take you magically to the castle of the Earl of Somerset. That's where we're going to put on a play in which you'll be a part actor."

  "Me, m'Lord?" said Ned.

  "Yes, you," growled Tom.

  "So, stay around the kennels, where I can have you sent for quickly, when I next come," said Jim.

  "He'll be there," said Tom. "There's a lot to do around the kennels, more than enough to keep him busy the rest of the day."

  "Very good," said Jim. "I'll see you later then, Ned. Thank you for finding him for me, Tom."

  "An honor, m'Lord," said Tom.

  The two of them went off. Jim got up from the table and went into the serving room. He expected to find Gwynneth Plyseth there as usual; but it was between meals and she was gone. Pleased to be alone, Jim went over to the fireplace, in which a fire was always burning winter and summer; with its arrangement of suspended chains, swing-out handles and other devices, to hold laden platters of food close to the warmth, while they were waiting their turn to be served. There was nothing in the way of food waiting there now. Jim pushed aside a few of the swinging handles and yelled up the chimney.

  "Hob-One!" he called. There was no answer. After a moment he called again.

  "Hob-One!" he called again, more sharply. "Hob, I know you're there. This is your lord, James. Come down immediately."

  Hob's face peeked into the room upside down from inside the top edge of the fireplace.

  "You're really alone, m'Lord?" he asked.

  "Do you see anyone with me?" said Jim, a little more snappishly than he had intended to. "Hob-One, when I call you, you come. You know with me you're safe, whether there's somebody with me or not."

  Hob popped out of the fireplace and hovered in sitting position on a waft of smoke that had suddenly decided to go just outside the fireplace chimney.

  "I'm very sorry, m'Lord," he said. "Pray forgive me. It's just a lifetime of having to be cautious… but I'll always come right away from now on, m'Lord. You can count on me."

  "That's good," said Jim. "Because that's just what I intend to do. Now, I'm going to bring Secoh here to join us, and then we're going to go off and visit a number of other, larger dragons."

  "Other dragons!" cried Hob, and leaped to Jim's shoulder, wrapping his arms around Jim's neck, and holding so tightly that Jim found some difficulty in speaking.

  "Relax, now, Hob-One," he said. "Remember who you are, and where you are. You're Hob-One of Malencontri, and you're in Malencontri itself."

  Hob's hold loosened.

  "That's right," he said, with a fine combination of fearfulness and awe.

  Jim visualized Secoh appearing on the floor before him. For a moment, as with his visualizations earlier, there was a feeling of effort—and then all of a sudden Secoh was there, looking startled. The startled look faded as he recognized Jim.

  "M'Lord," he said, sitting down and trying hard to do his dragon equivalent of a courtly, human bow. "How did I get here?"

  "I brought you—with magic," said Jim.

  "Magic?" said Secoh.

  "Magic!" said Hob-One, clutching Jim's neck tightly again. He had ducked around so that Jim's head was between him and Secoh. "Is Secoh there?" he whispered in Jim's ear.

  "You know he is," said Jim. "Now you come around to my other shoulder and we'll talk with him."

  "Oh, m'Lord," said Hob-One, trembling. "I couldn't," he whispered in Jim's ear. "I always stayed well out of his reach, before. He's so close, now. I don't dare—"

  "Yes, you do," said Jim firmly. "Remember I'm with you. You're even holding on to me. There's nothing to be afraid of."

  There was a pause, and then he felt Hob inching around the back of his neck until he gradually moved to where at least most of him had to be visible to Secoh.

  "Hello, Hob," said Secoh.

  "H—Hob-One de Malencontri," said Hob-One, but his voice trembled as he spoke.

  "Greetings, Hob-One de Malencontri," said Secoh.

  "G-greetings, Secoh," said Hob-One, still tremulously.

  "Hob-One," said Jim, "is going with us, you and I, Secoh—to talk to the Cliffside dragons about how they're to come to the Earl's castle tomorrow and how they're to act at the Earl's tomorrow afternoon. It's very important they get things straight and do exactly what they're supposed to do. After I finish telling them, I want you to stay with them until they're ready to come. Then fly over with them, and make sure they follow my instructions exactly. You can handle that?"

  "Of course, m'Lord," said Secoh grimly. "They'll obey, or else!"

  "Now, there's something more," said Jim. "Hob-One here, is much braver than most hobgoblins, but he's a little bit worried at meeting all the Cliffside dragons at once. He doesn't know them the way he knows you—"

  "That's right!" said Hob.

  "—And I thought maybe you could assure him there's no need for him to be afraid; using yourself as an example of someone who has no fear of anything."

  "That's true," said Secoh. "I fear nothing—and, hobgoblin, I too used to be fearful. But I learned that there is never a need to be."

  "No need for you, maybe," said Hob-One. "You're a dragon."

  "I'm a small dragon," said Secoh. "A mere-dragon. One of a line of our race that's been badly stunted by the evil effects of the Loathly Tower, in the meres where we've always made our home."

  "The Loathly Tower?" echoed Hob-One. "The Loathly Tower? Is that near here?"

  "Some little distance," said Secoh offhandedly.

  "Oh, my!" said Hob.

  "Why do you whimper?" demanded Secoh. "Near or far, it makes no difference. Large dragon or small, it makes no difference. I was with m'Lord James and other Companions, including Smrgol, a wise old dragon, who taught me that fear is something to be disregarded. With him I fought a dragon much larger than myself, and won."

  "Oh!" said Hob. "Are there dragons much larger than you?"

  "Many," said Secoh. "And very much larger. They don't bother me. If one of them offends me, I go for his throat!"

  "You do?" Hob stared. "But if they're bigger than you, don't you realize what one of them might do to you?"

  "No," said Secoh, "never think about that. There's only one rule in fighting. Don't wait—go for their throats!"

  "That's all right for you, of course," said Hob. "You've got all those big teeth."

  "You've got teeth," said Secoh.

  "Well, yes," said Hob. "But they're very little teeth."

  "What does the size of teeth have to do with it?" said Secoh fiercely. "It's going right at them that counts!"

  Hob clutched Jim's neck tightly.

  "Oh, m'Lord," he said in Jim's ear, "I could never do that! We hobs aren't dragons."

  "That's the sort of thi
ng I used to say," said Secoh. " 'Oh, I'm only a mere-dragon,' I used to tell everyone. Hah! When we go to the Cliffside dragons, just watch me—how I talk to them, how I deal with them! You'll see!"

  "M'Lord," said Hob in Jim's ear again, "do I have to go?"

  "I'm afraid so," said Jim. He had been working up the visualization of the main cave where the Cliffside dragons all got together on important occasions, and now he had it firmly in mind. "Here we go now, all three of us."

  Chapter 32

  Jim visualized his goal; and they were instantly in a place that at first seemed very dark, but got brighter as their eyes adjusted.

  It was an enormous cave with a high arching roof and a bowllike floor with a single vertical rock wall between them, so that the whole cavern was like a natural amphitheater, deep in the rock that was the Cliffside dragons' home.

  The wall and ceiling were of some dark granite. But they were patterned with a perfect lacework of streams of what appeared to be molten silver, each stream no thicker than a pencil, but all together covering the walls thickly. Each of the slim lines of silver radiated light—something more than a glow, and something less than the more customary illumination such as a candle or even a low-wattage light bulb might give.

  The result was—and it became apparent as their eyes finally reached full adjustment—that the full cavern, including its dark, overarching natural roof, was generally lit by these streams. It was not as bright as a day—or rather, it was about as bright as a day overcast with thunderclouds. At the moment there were only a few dragons present, a couple of them talking and the rest simply passing from one of the many entrances into the cavern over and out by another of the entrances.

  Jim summoned by magic one of the padded and backed benches from his own Great Hall, and sat down. Hob-One was still on his shoulder. Secoh sat down on his haunches—not a normal position for a dragon to adopt, but he had stuck to it steadily since he had been visiting Jim at Malencontri and had to do with Jim and other humans.

  "What happens now?" whispered Hob-One in Jim's ear, but also looking over at Secoh as he spoke.

  "We wait," said Jim.

  They waited.

  Little by little dragons began to drift into the cavern. These came in through all the different entrances, and tended to gather together near the entrances to talk in low voices, so that only a deep rumbling but no intelligible words reached Jim, Hob and Secoh, waiting down at the low point of the bowl-shaped floor.

  However, as more and more came in, those near the wall moved farther down into the cavern; and there was a general shift in the direction of Jim, Hob and Secoh, happening as if it was nothing more than the result of casual movements among the dragons wandering from group to group of their fellows.

  Still, in about fifteen minutes, the cavern had reached the point of being about three-quarters filled. By this time Jim estimated that most if not all of the dragons of Cliffside were present; but they still tended to cluster up close to the surrounding wall.

  But then a new movement began. A sort of leapfrogging from position to position in groups; and the tide of great bodies flowed forward down the slope of the floor until the whole mass was solidly in place before Jim, Secoh and Hob-One. All this was accompanied by more of the low muttering among the dragons. But when at last they were packed solidly around the visitors, the muttering died away; and there was a dead silence in the cavern.

  "Jim!" cried a large dragon in the front row, his incredible bass voice making the single word bounce off the walls of the cavern. There was a note of surprise in it, as if Jim had just that second materialized in front of his eyes.

  "Gorbash!" replied Jim. Gorbash was the only dragon there who called Jim by that version of his name, rather than "James." It was a special mark of intimacy between them.

  Indeed, they had been intimate, since it was Gorbash's body Jim had occupied; controlling it, in spite of Gorbash's own wishes, from the moment Jim had arrived in this fourteenth-century world right up through the ending of the fight at the Loathly Tower.

  Gorbash was a dragon who had been generally considered not too bright by the other members of the Cliffside community, and unimportant. But he had gained remarkable stature in their eyes by his association with Jim; and he had exploited this to its limit, to the point where the other dragons at least listened to him before arguing with him nowadays—and listening was something any dragon found hard to do. Argument was built into them, so to speak.

  Whether the Cliffside dragons, as a community, liked Jim himself, Jim did not know. They were perfectly capable of liking another individual, as Secoh and Smrgol, the now-dead great-uncle of Gorbash, had demonstrated. They just never gave any indication of it. Also, they were very touchy, and inclined to be wary of Jim. It was hard to believe that creatures so large and fierce should need to be wary of anything. But the fact was that only lately—in the last few hundred years—they had become aware that there was an even fiercer and more dangerous species, in this world, than they were.

  This was the species to which Jim belonged, which the dragons called "georges" after the Saint George who had gone down in history by slaying a dragon single-handed. Even now, it was only the younger dragons that would risk stopping to talk to a george if they found one out in the fields, or away from other georges, or the buildings in which georges usually lived.

  The thought of that, now, reminded Jim that if anyone here did really like him, it would be the younger dragons.

  For that he had Secoh to thank. It had been Secoh, with his storytelling of the battle at the Loathly Tower, including his own part in it—and other adventures in which he had been with Jim, Brian and other nondragons—that had won the imagination and admiration of the young dragons. There were no young dragons down near the front of the crowd that faced him now. Youngsters—dragons under a mere hundred years of age—were crowded to the back of any gathering like this, since they were still juvenile and unimportant.

  Gorbash, on the other hand, was a sort of fair-weather friend, Jim was aware. Gorbash's connection with Jim had given him status; but he would back Jim only so far—and then, only as long as it seemed useful to him.

  "Well," boomed a short, broad dragon, also in the front rank, about three bodies over to the left of Gorbash, "when do we get to go to the Earl's castle?"

  It was very like dragons to be slow about getting around to speaking and then immediately jump right into the heart of whatever was to be discussed.

  "That's why I'm here—" Jim searched his mind frantically for the name of the dragon who had spoken. A white scar along the upper part of his muzzle happily brought back the elusive memory. "—Lamarg. I made this trip specially to tell you all about it. It'll be tomorrow—"

  All at once the whole dragon community was talking among themselves at once.

  "What did he say?" "He said tomorrow." "It should have been before this!" "No, at the end is the best. He was saving it for us." "Shut up, Maglar, you never know what you're talking about!" "Tomorrow—that's just after tonight!—"

  Eventually the interchanges died down and there was quiet in the hall again.

  "We don't have to pay for any of this, do we?" demanded Lamarg.

  There was a growl from the assembled dragons, seconding this pertinent question.

  "Not a thing," said Jim. "All you have to do is follow what I tell you to do, exactly. I want you to go there and come back safely; but to do that you're going to have to do precisely as I tell you. And Secoh's going to go along with you to remind you if you happen to forget any of the things that you have to do."

  More general conversation at this. Some cries of "He's only a mere-dragon!" from anonymous members safely hidden in the crowd. Secoh bristled, dragon fashion, half raising his wings.

  "Why does it have to be him, James?" protested Lamarg. "It could be one of us. He's not even a Cliffside dragon."

  "Because I know more of things like this than any of you, Lamarg. Who else here has a tenth of my experien
ce with georges?" snapped Secoh.

  Lamarg growled wordlessly, but did not continue the argument.

  "Also," put in Jim to calm tempers, "because Secoh's been with me and fought alongside me so many times he's the most likely one to know which way I'd want you to do things, if an emergency comes up. Now that makes sense, doesn't it?"

  The Cliffside dragons talked it over for two or three minutes. Finally they came to the conclusion that it did make sense.

  Jim waited patiently. The process of doing anything with the Cliffsiders as a whole was always a lengthy one, but there was nothing to be done about that. Meanwhile, however, it gave him a chance to speak a private word to Secoh.

  He leaned over and spoke in the mere-dragon's ear.

  "Secoh," he said in a low voice, "I'm going to tell them you'll give them the word when it's time to go to their place by the Earl's castle. It'll be near a clearing you'll see from the air. There'll be a lot of people standing at one end of the clearing, then there'll be Lady Angela, myself and possibly some other people, plus an ox and an ass, putting on a play near the other end—"

  "A play?" asked Secoh in a deep, but relatively quiet, conspiratorial whisper.

  "That's when a story is acted out," said Jim. Then, as Secoh still looked doubtful, frowning at the word "act," Jim added, "Acting is when people do what was told about in a story. As if we went through the motions of the fight at the Loathly Tower all over again for people to see."

  Secoh's head came up and his eyes lit up.

  "Could we, m'Lord?" he whispered.

  "Maybe," said Jim incautiously—and then hurried to add, "but it'll have to be sometime pretty far in the future before we think about it seriously."

  A little of the light died in Secoh's eyes, but some was left.

  "Yes, m'Lord," he said. "Where by this clearing do you want the Cliffsiders?"

  "That's the point," said Jim. "I'd like them to come down in the woods—see if you can't find a smaller clearing some place, not too far away, and then come in on foot until they're right next to the clearing, behind those of us who are putting on the play. They should be far enough back in the trees, though, so that the people watching from the other end of the clearing can't see them. They can take advantage of the things that will be built for the play to more or less hide behind; but they have to keep their voices down."