The Dragon in Lyonesse

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "I wouldn't think—since we're only just into the Drowned Land, not Lyonesse—" began Jim, then checked himself. "But maybe you're right."

  Now that he had taken notice of this shadow of the Dark Powers, he felt the same instinct to be wary that was moving Brian. Half unconsciously, he reached for the hilt of his own sword; and followed Brian's example by breaking the tightness that riding and gravity had brought it to in his scabbard.

  "Darkness… and mist," he said to Brian. "Remember the mist that held about the marsh and the Loathly Tower before Carolinus showed up with his staff to hold it back so we could fight what they sent against us. We might watch for any sign of mist or fog."

  "No sign of such, yet," muttered Brian. He scanned the peaceful sky overhead. "But you say well, James. From now on let us be on watch—though our guide does not seem concerned about it."

  He frowned at the back of the soldier ahead.

  "If our way grows much steeper," he added, "we will have to dismount and walk, leading the horses."

  This was correct, Jim realized now. The soldier was not sparing his own horse, or acting as if he was about to. But just then they entered a cleft running upward in the rock; and when at last they emerged from this into the open again, the way they were following had struck a long downward slope that continued until a belt of trees could be seen. The soldier broke into a gallop.

  "Hold!" shouted Brian furiously, reining in Blanchard. "Damn your bones and guts! Fellow! Come back here!"

  The language might be unintelligible to the rider ahead, but the tone of Brian's voice was not. The other pulled his horse to a stop and turned in his saddle.

  "Come back here!" roared Brian, beckoning him with full arm movements. The soldier turned his horse and rode back up to them.

  "Are there no wits at all in that wooden head of yours?" exploded Brian. "Do you think I'd risk the legs of a warhorse the worth of Blanchard by galloping down a slope like that—just because you don't give a damn if you break the neck of that screw you're riding? By all the Saints in the Calendar, I'll see you in Hell and roasting first! We go down as carefully as we came up, or you can…"

  Brian's language became very colorful indeed. Once more, the words in which they were uttered might mean nothing to the soldier, but Brian's obvious anger, reinforced by emphatic gestures at his mount and the rock underfoot, could not be misunderstood. The expression on the soldier's face hardly changed. Only his mouth tightened. Without a word he turned his horse downslope once more and walked it forward.

  Jim and Brian followed at the same pace. Brian, deprived of a target for his outrage, snorted and grumbled for several minutes to Jim, gradually bleeding off what was left of his fury.

  "It could be," said Jim diplomatically, when his friend finally fell silent, "his horse is used to a pace like that on such a slope."

  "Bloody fool, anyway!" muttered Brian. "But you may be right, James. He may not have thought it a danger any more for us than it was for him."

  With that, the fit of anger, like all such with Brian, was gone, and already half-forgotten.

  They reached the trees in a very short time, after all. Distance seemed strangely foreshortened here in the Drowned Land, thought Jim. Perhaps that was part of its innate magic for those who had chosen to stay with it—to have a kingdom larger than it seemed.

  Now that he had noticed it, he was not surprised when, after traveling for only a short time through the trees, they came out on a grassy plain. In the apparent distance there was another green band of trees, stretching as far ahead of them as Jim could see; and in no way different from the trees they had just passed through.

  Here, however, their guide reined in his horse. When they rode up level with him, he waved his hand forward, almost as if shooing them onward, and turned his own horse around as if to ride back.

  "He can't mean that is Lyonesse ahead there," said Brian. "James, I am going to have a word with Dafydd when this is all over. The same sun, shining on the same sort of forest? That's not what I remember from the moonlit, black-and-silver country we visited before. Can you not find some way to speak to this—this Maggot?"

  "Madog," said Jim; and the soldier, hearing his name pronounced in approximately recognizable fashion, looked at him.

  "Lyonesse?" asked Jim, pointing his finger forward and sweeping it from left to right across the grassy plain and the trees beyond it.

  Madog said something in his own language.

  "Lyonesse?" Jim repeated, still pointing.

  Madog nodded his head vigorously, rode forward no more than a dozen feet out onto the plain, dismounted, and, holding the ends of his reins, stepped forward a cautious step, followed by no more than half a step, even more cautiously. He stopped, and swept his own pointing finger right and left as Jim had, above the grass of the plain.

  "I doubt him," said Brian coldly. "It does not look like Lyonesse, it does not feel like Lyonesse. There is something amiss here, James, and it begins with this one. I no longer trust him."

  "But we don't have much choice," said Jim, "unless we want to turn around and go back. I can't believe Dafydd would send us with a guide who couldn't or wouldn't show us where we wanted to go."

  "There is that," said Brian slowly, running his forefinger across the stiff blond bristles of an upper lip unshaven since the day before. His eyes went to the soldier. "Harkee, Maggot! If thou hast played us false, and I live, I will bring thee to due reward for it!"

  Madog looked back at him fearlessly, but otherwise with no expression at all, remounted his horse, and left them at a good pace, back up the side of the mountain they had just come down.

  Brian, for his part, looked over at Jim.

  "There being small choice, then," he said, "let us go on."

  "Just a minute," said Jim, dismounting. "I want to check on something. Brian, if I disappear, it'll only be for a short while. Stay exactly where you are. Don't go either forward or back."

  "It's just three more steps on, m'Lord!" piped up a small voice behind him; and both Jim and Brian turned to see Hob's head poking out from under the cover of their belongings on the back of the sumpter horse.

  Hob had been completely quiet from the moment they had left Malencontri, possibly taking no chance that Jim might get annoyed with him and send him home by magic, after all. But now his face was one wide smile. Jim had actually forgotten he was with them; and he suspected Brian had also.

  "Lyonesse, you mean?" Jim said.

  "Yes, my Lord. The edge of it, that is."

  "How do you know?"

  "I can see it, my Lord."

  "How can you see it?"

  Hob's smile turned into an expression of puzzlement.

  "I don't know, m'Lord."

  "Well, it doesn't matter." Undoubtedly, Jim reminded himself, this must be another of the unconscious magics that various Naturals possessed" Of course Hob couldn't explain it, any more than he could have explained how he could ride long distances on a brief waft of smoke.

  Jim turned. He took a step forward across the grassy plain toward the farther band of trees, bright in the sunlight. Then a second step… and a third—

  With the last, the warm sun was no longer overhead. There was no distant line of trees, but black, heavy trunks with black, twisted limbs loomed close about him, under an oversized, white sun or moon shedding a light that was bright, but showed no color anywhere, in ground or trees; and the sky was a pale white like the horizon just before moonrise.

  Jim turned about and looked behind him. Brian was gone, along with the normal sun and the rising ground to the mountain they had just crossed. Where those had been was a small glen, or treeless patch, with only colorless grass sparse upon the black soil. All shadows were sharp-edged and impenetrable in their darkness.

  He took a long step back the way he had come—and there was sunlight, blue sky, green vegetation, Brian, and the horses.

  "Stay where you are a moment, Brian," he said. "It's Lyonesse, all right. I just have to ch
eck on something else. Be back in just a few moments."

  He visualized Kineteté's sitting room and felt his magic work. He was there; and Kineteté was in the same chair he had seen her in before, but this time apparently reading from the rolled parchment of a manuscript. She looked up at him, over the top edge of it.

  "Well?" she said. "What's it this time?"

  "We've reached the border between the Drowned Land and Lyonesse," said Jim. "But not at the entrance to the Gnarlyland caves. I just wanted to check with you as to whether this was a safe place to cross over."

  "I haven't the slightest idea," she said.

  "But I haven't described where we are to you, yet—"

  "Not necessary. Scrying glasses are toys for a Magickian's childhood in Magick. I can see where you and Brian are."

  "Oh," said Jim. "Dafydd had to leave us to go to the King of the Drowned Land—"

  "I know. What else do you want to tell me that I already know?"

  "Well, for one thing…" he said. He was becoming so used to Kineteté's sharp-tongued manner that it hardly registered on him anymore. It was simply a different version of Carolinus's short-tempered way of expressing himself. Perhaps all Mages developed something of the sort with time. "Well, for one thing, Brian and I and Hob—"

  "Jim, you let that pesky little devil have anything he wants—"

  "Now you're telling me things I already know," said Jim; in spite of the tolerance he had achieved toward her, he found himself enjoying the chance to interrupt her. "As I was about to say, Brian, Hob, and I are headed across the border. I can feel the magic you gave me. Will I also be able to feel it in Lyonesse?"

  "Can you feel magick directed against you?"

  "I don't know," said Jim, suddenly baffled. "I don't know if I ever had—"

  "Oh, you've had. Obviously, that's something you've still got to learn. To answer you, I don't know whether you'll be able to feel what I lent you, once you're in Lyonesse. It depends on you—and on Lyonesse."

  "And when you told me," Jim continued, "I'd have to leave Lyonesse to get it again; did that mean that whoever there took it from me wouldn't be able to destroy it, or keep it for themselves?"

  "No one," said Kineteté severely, "can destroy magick. As for anyone keeping it for her or his own, that is not possible, even in a place like Lyonesse. No, once you're outside, it will automatically come back to you as the Magickian it belongs with."

  "Good," said Jim. He took a deep, relieved breath.

  "Now," he said, "one last question. Have you any advice, any instructions, warnings… anything at all to tell me?"

  "I have not."

  "I suppose there's no point in my asking about Carolinus?"

  "He's resting," said Kineteté. "But it may be some time before you see him. He has a tendency to get overexcited when you're around; I should never have let him go to that last dinner of yours where you celebrated by getting drunk, for instance."

  "I did not celebrate by getting drunk!" said Jim. "It was an accident—"

  "If you say so," said Kineteté in a tone of utter disbelief. "Is that the end of your questions?"

  "It is," said Jim stiffly.

  "Farewell."

  "Farewell."

  "Oh, there you are," said Brian. "I brought the horses up to where you disappeared."

  "Thanks." Jim climbed into the saddle on Gorp's back. "Ready, Brian?"

  "I have been ready some little time now. What is that strange sort of armor you've put on your nose?"

  "They're called glasses," said Jim shortly. "Both magic and necessary. Pay no attention to them. Here we go."

  Together they rode into the silver-and-black land.

  Chapter Eight

  They rode through the black-and-white land in silence for a while. In too much silence. The dense, black-appearing grass below them absorbed the sound of hoof-falls from their horses. No air stirred other sound to life in the branches above them. All was either in bright sunlight or utterly black shadow; and there was no path for them to follow.

  But the thick-trunked trees stood a distance apart, as they might have in the world above where the shade of leaves overhead had killed off nearly all undergrowth. Here, too, the trees were miserly, with scant leaves, but their heavy trunks and thick branches hid the ground from the white sun, painting it with a pattern of utter darkness.

  It was all no different than it had been the time they had ridden through this same sort of forest under this same unnatural sun; but Jim had forgotten the feel of it until now. Glancing over at Brian, he saw his friend's face was set and expressionless; and guessed Brian had forgotten, also.

  There was no indication of the way they should go—except straight ahead. But, unless this part of Lyonesse was different from that they had passed through on an earlier trip, they would come eventually to some person, creature, or sign that would give them an idea in which way they might head.

  But silence like this on Brian's part was not like him. Jim glanced at his friend out of the corners of his eyes. Brian was riding along, frowning at Blanchard's ears, now. That was better. It was not Brian's nature to be impressed with any gloomy emotion for long—and, as if Blanchard knew this—he was wonderfully sensitive to Brian's moods—the horse was finding his own way softly over the dark growth carpeting the ground between the trees.

  Jim opened his mouth to say something to rouse Brian, but before he could speak, Brian spoke.

  "Hold, James," he said, reining in. "Something is bothering Blanchard's right leg. Ho, now, lad—stand you still!"

  He swung down out of his saddle and expertly lifted his destrier's right leg, bending it up backward at the knee to look at the surface of the hoof.

  "As I thought, a small stone…" While he spoke, he was prying the source of irritation out, using his eating knife to do so. No knight in his right mind would dull his carefully sharpened and pointed poniard or other dagger in that sort of task. "Underfoot growth like this often hides such…"

  Sitting Gorp and waiting, Jim was suddenly aware, from the edge of his vision, of a branch bending down as a small, dark form ran down it and leaped fairly onto the pommel of his saddle. It stared at him. He stared at it. A squirrel—gray at guess, if he had been able to see it in color. It looked at him completely unafraid, its jaws a little open almost as if it was about to laugh at him. Then it leaped to the ground and was gone.

  "… For all that," Brian was going on as he remounted, "we should be in a sad contretemps in this foreign land, if either of our horses need shoeing." He settled himself and picked up his reins. They moved forward. "—But you know, James, it may be I misjudged that fellow Dafydd gave us for guide."

  "Language difficulties," offered Jim.

  "Ah, you think so?" said Brian, brightening at once; and Jim, with a sinking feeling inside him, realized that the knight had not understood his answer at all; but had taken it as an explanation that completely relieved him of any need to feel he had been unkind. "Still, that is the way things are nowadays, James. A hard time to be alive and live as a gentleman should."

  The was no point in trying to correct him now. Jim nodded.

  "Could you ever have imagined any times like ours?" went on Brian; and, without waiting for an answer, he began to pour forth words. "One never knows how a fellow like that—a foreigner, poor lad, of course; not a word of English—will react to the simplest order; and it's not as if he was an equal one could call to account for his attitude or tone of voice. All a piece of the same thing nowadays—three pence a day for extra men at harvest time, ever since the plague began! Our fathers and our fathers' fathers lived in paradise by comparison. Who could expect so much change in one generation? In their time, life was at least as a man might expect it to be: if they were faithful to Holy Church and lived as men ought, they could expect things to go as they should from birth to grave."

  "Well…" began Jim, but Brian poured on.

  "Oh, there might be an occasional short harvest and a somewhat heavy wi
nter—hunger in cot and hall. Raiders from the sea might foray inland upon them from time to time; and a few other ordinary difficulties might arise. But if they went on much as their forefathers had, they knew that life would go as all men were used."

  "Every generation—" Jim made another attempt, but was still thwarted.

  "Of course!" Brian was going on. "True, they knew nothing of the larger world. Unless they went on Crusade, they never set foot in the Holy Land. They wore armor of no more than naked chain mail—and you know yourself, James, that while chain mail without plates at vulnerable spots—I am not speaking of those rich suits all of plate—plain chain mail, I say, may stop a sword point or edge from cutting the flesh; yet the force of the blow alone may well break the bones beneath the chain. And old-fashioned helms such as our guide wore—"

  "Brian," said Jim, with determination to get a word in edgewise, "in every time and place, people think no other time could match theirs for troubles and accomplishments. But half a century later their great-grandchildren are singing the same song."

  " 'Singing'," James… ?"

  "I meant 'saying.' "

  "Then their great-grandchildren must be greatly ignorant."

  "That's precisely it. Just as Angie and I were of this—" Jim caught himself just in time. "The point is they are ignorant; because they never lived through their great-grandparents' time and only knew a few small facts about it. Beyond those facts, they tended to assume it had all the advantages of their time and none of its drawbacks. They would probably assume, for example, that knights of this time wore full plate armor."

  "But that is exactly what I am telling you, James! Such would think that the small things they knew and endured must be the best and worst of all that could happen—that none could ever struggle as they did, or endured what they were enduring! Would it not open their eyes to live in the times we do now?"

  "It certainly did… I mean would—" Jim caught himself just in time. But Brian, in full cry after his argument now, did not hear.

  "They would be amazed at what we could do and have done; but think the Earth was about to be called to justice, when they learned of the plagues, the assaults, the wars, the crushing taxes—"