The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  Parthet didn’t have anything to say as we stepped through to Basil and hurried on to the huge kitchen area behind and below the great hall. The cooks weren’t around. The kitchen was deserted but for two men-at-arms who held their halberds aimed more or less at a huge cast-iron kettle near one of the fireplaces.

  Eggs at Castle Basil are generally served scrambled, cooked by the gross in kettles that are large enough for boiled missionary, stirred constantly with spoons the size of canoe paddles. I saw two large egg crates, the kettle in the center, and a small collection of eggshells on the floor to one side.

  “The cooks had started preparing breakfast,” Parthet said. He pointed at the kettle and gestured for me to precede him. I nodded and went up to the kettle and looked down.

  There were some normal eggs in the bottom, yolks and so forth, but there were also a couple of tiny dragon forms—fetuses, I guess I would have to call them. They appeared perfectly formed, so I assumed that they were close to being big enough to hatch. I reached over to the nearest egg crate, took an egg out, cracked it on the edge of the kettle, and dumped in a regular egg. The second one was normal too, but the third I tried had another of the little dragons.

  Altogether, I cracked a dozen eggs and got four dragons.

  “Are these regular dragons or those small scavengers that run around the woods?” I asked.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Parthet said. “At this point, dragons are dragons, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Is that what their eggs normally look like?” It didn’t seem right. I thought reptile eggs were usually leathery.

  “No. These are chicken eggs. They came out from under chickens—yesterday it would have been.”

  “You’re the wizard. What does it mean?”

  “I wish I knew,” Parthet said. There was no trace of his earlier anger in his voice or face now. “It may just be part of the increased weirdness I warned you about, but I’m afraid that there may be a lot more to it. It seems that it must be some kind of omen.”

  “Not a good one, I take it.”

  “No. Kardeen and his clerk are already searching old manuscripts, trying to find references. I need to get busy doing the same thing. The answer must be around here somewhere. I hope.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Right now, it may be enough just to lend your presence. This has a lot of the working folks scared. We’ll get men to load all these eggs up on a cart, take them out to the forest, dump them, crush them. But nobody will handle the eggs without a Hero around to bail them out in case a mama dragon comes around or something.”

  “What about tomorrow’s eggs, and the next day’s?” I asked. “I can’t see doing this kind of thing every day.”

  Parthet shrugged. “Until we know what’s going on, we can do little more.” He scowled down at the eggs. Then he shook his head. “I’m sure that news of this has already started to spread. We’ll have all kinds of bizarre reactions. Some farmers will likely kill all their chickens. Maybe more will just bury the eggs. I don’t know. We’ll have to keep watch. But I’ll bet that scrambled eggs are going to be hard to come by for a while.”

  “Is this happening at any of the other castles, or is it just here?”

  “I haven’t checked yet,” Parthet said. “That’s something else on the list.”

  So I rode shotgun for the garbage detail. It wasn’t the most glamorous of assignments, but I wish that all Hero jobs were that simple. None of the fetuses made a move, or even a sound. No full-grown dragons came to dispute what we were doing. By the time I left the keep for my detail, Kardeen and Parthet were getting a grip on the rest of the morning’s needs. The cooks were shooed back into the kitchen. Breakfast being late at Castle Basil was scandalous. Parthet was getting ready to hop around the kingdom to check on the eggs elsewhere, and to send riders to outlying areas that didn’t have family doorways handy. Baron Kardeen was arranging to send riders to the villages around Basil.

  Meanwhile, I shepherded more than a hundred dozen eggs to a pit outside the town and watched while two of King Pregel’s stalwarts smashed eggs with paving stones, poured lamp oil over the mess, and set fire to all of the eggs, good and bad. We stood around and watched while the super omelet cooked and burned, and when the fire died out, the soldiers shoveled in dirt and more rocks to bury the mess. Then we rode back to the castle.

  When I walked back into the great hall of Basil, nearly two hours after I left, I spotted Joy and Aaron up at the head table. Breakfast, the late breakfast, was just starting to wind down. There was less table talk than usual, and what I could hear was all about the mysterious eggs. “Who’s attacking our food?” one soldier asked me as I passed. All I could do was shake my head. In the buffer zone, an attack on the food supply could be catastrophic.

  I kissed Joy as I sat next to her. “I didn’t think you were coming over,” I said to her before I turned to Aaron. “Hello, Aaron. How you doing?” I asked while a platter of breakfast was filled in front of me.

  “Pretty good,” Aaron said, grinning. “You guys eat like this all the time?”

  “All the time.” I smiled back at him, then turned to get a start on my own belated breakfast. Smelling that dragon omelet cook had given me a real appetite.

  “I think maybe there’s a problem,” Joy said after I had a few minutes to take the edge off. “A farmer came to the castle gate, back at Cayenne, and said that there’s a dragon on his farm. Lesh talked to him. He said that the farmer was scared out of his wits. Were there really dragon eggs here?”

  “Tiny dragons in chicken eggs,” I said. “We’ve burned and buried them.” And now a full-sized dragon, I thought. Just what I needed.

  “I suppose the farmer said that his dragon was as big as a mountain,” I said.

  “He said it was big. It was scaring his family and his livestock.”

  “A real dragon?” Aaron asked, excited.

  “It could be,” I told him. “There are real dragons around here.”

  “Can I go see it?”

  “I don’t think so, sport.” I grinned. “Dragons can be dangerous.”

  “You gonna kill it?”

  “That’s what everyone expects of me. Maybe after it’s dead you can have a look. I’ll have to check with Parthet first.” Parthet and I really hadn’t finished our argument over Aaron’s future, but for the moment at least, the wizard had claimed guardianship over Aaron. After our previous go-rounds, I didn’t want to haul Aaron off anywhere without checking with Parthet first. Although I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet, I guess I had already given in to Parthet’s arguments.

  “Did Lesh come through with you?” I asked Joy.

  “No. He was still trying to calm the farmer when I left.”

  I had been wolfing down the food as quickly as I could. The platters were getting low. I got down a little more before I resumed the conversation.

  “I’d better go see what’s up. Why don’t you stay here with Aaron? When Parthet gets back from his running around, let him know where I’ve gone. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

  I started to get up, but Joy put her hand on my arm. “You think there really is a dragon?” she asked.

  I hesitated, then nodded. “The way things are going the last couple of days, there probably is.”

  “Be careful, Gil.”

  My smile may have flashed and vanished too quickly, but I assured her that I would be careful—as careful as possible. That was a major qualifier.

  I stepped through to Cayenne and went down to the great hall. Lesh and Harkane were waiting for me there, all duded up for combat. Timon was down in the ground-floor stable with the horses. For the first time, he was dressed for fighting too, ready to claim his new status as my squire. I grinned at him, tousled his hair, and let him help me put my armor on—chain mail over a padded leather tunic, and a steel and leather helmet with a long, curved strip of iron that comes down over my nose. I hate that helmet. Most times, I prefer to
substitute a Cubs cap for it, but I was riding out to do battle with a dragon—possibly—and dragons aren’t to be trifled with. With my luck, I’d run into one that rooted for the Cardinals.

  After more than three years of Varay, I no longer felt quite as foolish riding out to do battle as I had at first. I had my two elf swords, a dagger with a foot-long blade, a compound bow with a full quiver of razor-headed arrows, and a .458 magnum big-game rifle. Dragons are the biggest game there is. The remaining major snag is that firearms only seem to work about one-third of the time in the buffer zone, less often than that when things are really critical. I had bought the rifle after my first two encounters with dragons, but I had never had a chance to test it on a live dragon. Believe me, I never even considered going out looking for a dragon just so I could test-fire the weapon. A Hero doesn’t get to be an old Hero by looking for trouble he doesn’t absolutely, positively have to face.

  “How far are we going, Lesh?” I asked.

  “About an hour’s ride, lord,” he said. He pointed off into the foothills, toward the higher ridges of the Titans beyond.

  “What did you make of this farmer’s story?”

  “He’s seen a dragon, right enough, lord, close enough for details. He gave me a good description,” Lesh said.

  “How big did he say it was?”

  “Said when it put out it wings it covered his whole farm.”

  “I hope he was exaggerating.”

  “I’m sure he was, lord,” Lesh said. But, like as not, the dragon was still large enough to be a major pain.

  I tried not to show it—putting on a brave front is essential PR for a certified Hero—but, to phrase it as concisely as the language permits, I was scared shitless. The traditional lore in Varay was that no mortal could slay a dragon and live through the experience. I had killed two of them, though the first really didn’t count, since an elf warrior had done at least ninety percent of the job first. But the elf was about to crap out permanently, and he told me to take his sword and finish the job. I did, and got to keep the sword to boot. That was how I got Dragon’s Death. The second dragon came during the Battle of Thyme. That dragon was a weapon controlled by the wizard of the Etevar of Dorthin, brought in to try to get rid of me and scare off the Varayan army so that the Dorthinis could conquer Varay. That dragon was pretty much my own kill, though the fight was too close for me to do any gloating over it, so the new and improved “traditional” wisdom was that only a mortal who had killed a dragon could kill one. But if the next dragon I met had me for brunch, the Varayans would simply move on to “Release 3.0” of the new and improved traditional wisdom to cover the situation, maybe something like “Three dragons and you’re out,” or something equally half-witty. I was pushing the odds so far out of shape that even Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t cover my kind of risk.

  There isn’t much level ground in the region surrounding Castle Cayenne. “Flat land” is the top of a hill or the narrow valley between two ridges. The roads, such as they are, tend to follow the valleys—when the many spring-fed streams in the area leave room for paths or trails. In the spring, when snowmelt from the mountains is added to the normal flow of water, the hills can be more like chains of islands scattered around like bead necklaces. But even at the flood, the waters rarely get dangerously deep. Just pesky.

  The farmers of Varay are good at land conservation, though. They follow the contours of the terrain to minimize erosion. Back home, even with all the scientists working on agriculture and soil retention, some farmers don’t bother with such elementary steps. And even though Varay remains technologically in the early Middle Ages, the farmers get almost modern yields from their fields. To feed us all as much as we need to eat in the buffer zone, the farms have to be extraordinarily productive. Part of it, according to Parthet, is simply the magical nature of the seven kingdoms, but I’m never willing to slight the importance of the people out working the fields nine or ten months a year. They do the visible magic.

  We stopped a couple of times to talk to farmers who were out working. I asked if they had seen this new dragon in the region. One was sure that he hadn’t. “I’d sure a-known if I had.” The other wasn’t certain, but he thought that maybe he had seen a dragon flying in the distance the day before.

  The sky was clear, with just a few wispy cirrus clouds off in the west, and it wasn’t all that hot yet as we rode out. The breeze was from the north and still carried a faint hint of the cool it picked up over the Mist, hundreds of miles away. Wearing twenty-five pounds of armor and padding makes a person very sensitive to temperature. With the sun out, wearing armor does for you about what a wrapping of aluminum foil does for the potato you throw in with the coals on your barbecue.

  “We’re getting close,” Lesh said about the time I was wondering how much farther we had to go. I didn’t do so much horseback riding that I was really comfortable with it. I rarely went anywhere in Varay that I couldn’t get to through one of our magic doorways. I had done enough riding for the year on my tour of our western neighbors. I wasn’t eager for another marathon ride.

  I had been watching the sky since we left Cayenne. Dragons aren’t forced to stay anywhere they don’t want to stay. The two I had close experience with hadn’t come near the ground except to attack. On a few other occasions I had seen dragons flying high. Those hadn’t even bothered to attack.

  What I didn’t expect to find was a dragon squatting on the ground building a nest.

  Something about this dragon didn’t look quite right. I thought that it was just some trick of perspective at first, but then I realized that the “problem” was simply that the dragon was relatively small—far smaller than the two dragons I had killed. It had used its claws to scrape a shallow depression in the top of the next hill, but the dragon was still only fifty or sixty feet long, a midget compared to the other dragons I had met up close and personal.

  “A runt!” Lesh said. He sounded as relieved as I felt.

  I chuckled. “You want to handle this one?” I asked.

  He looked to see if I was serious and decided that I wasn’t. Oh well, it was worth a try.

  “There’s something nobody has ever said anything to me about,” I said. “Nobody ever said anything about dragons building their nests right here in Varay. It’s always They come in from the Mist, or They come in from the Titans.”

  “I don’t go lookin’ for them!” Lesh said.

  “Very wise attitude,” I said. “But what do we do with this thing?”

  “You have your gun,” Lesh reminded me.

  If it decides to work, I thought. I wasn’t optimistic … and I wasn’t sure that a gun would make the slightest impression on a dragon if it did work. It might just make the damn thing mad.

  I estimated the distance to the dragon at about three hundred yards. I would probably have to get a lot closer if I wanted to have any hope that the gun would be sufficiently effective. Using an elephant gun on a sixty-foot dragon might be as useful as plinking at an elephant with a .22. And closer would give me a poor angle for the shot through an eye toward the middle of the back of the head, the only target that seemed to have any chance of dropping any dragon.

  I dismounted, and my companions did likewise. Timon took the reins of all four horses and moved them back a few paces. Harkane held both the rifle and my bow, waiting for me to make my choice. Maybe I should have a golf bag, add a couple of wedges.

  “You suppose it’s the sporting thing to do, shoot the damn thing while it’s just sitting there?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, I suppose. I sure as hell wasn’t going to walk over, give it the finger, and make rude noises to get it mad. The dragon knew that we were there. It kept its eyes on us. but it wasn’t making any threatening gestures. It was just watching, the way any wild animal might, as long as you stay outside its flight distance.

  “Well, I might prefer the dragon to be sleeping, myself,” Lesh said. “But don’t count the teeth on a free horse.”

  “Y
eah.” I realized that I was stalling. The other times I had faced dragons, I didn’t have much choice in the matter, especially the second time. The dragon in question was looking to use me for chewing exercise. But this dragon was just sitting there in its nest—getting ready to lay eggs with baby chickens in them for all I knew.

  “Give me the rifle,” I said.

  The rifle was a Mannlicher bolt-action with a four-shot magazine. I took it, ran the bolt to get a shell into the firing chamber, and took aim. The telescopic sight brought the dragon’s face right up close. There was no way I could miss. I could look right into that bloodshot amber eye and see the blood vessels along the surface. The dragon didn’t even blink.

  I moved forward a half-dozen paces, a little lower on the slope. When I started to lose my angle on the dragon’s head, I stopped and lifted the rifle again. I aimed, took a breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened, just a click. I ran the bolt and tried again and got a popping sound like somebody stepping on a paper cup. There was no recoil, but when I ejected that round, all that came out was the cartridge case. Lesh bent down and picked up the slug, maybe eight inches in front of the muzzle.

  “Your father never had much luck with guns here either,” Harkane said. “Except once when he used a rifle as a club.”

  I left the bolt open while I looked down the barrel. Light glinted off my thumbnail, so I knew that the barrel wasn’t blocked, so I tried one more shot. This time I got a slightly louder plop and just a hint of recoil.

  “I saw the bullet fall,” Harkane said. “It went about three horse lengths.”

  I handed him the rifle. “I guess I have to go over there and do it the hard way,” I said. Harkane handed me my bow. I was going to have to get a lot closer to the dragon to do any good with it, though. And I didn’t have any hope at all of actually killing a dragon with an arrow. All I could hope for was to weaken it a bit, blind it with a little luck. Then I would have to finish the job with Dragon’s Death.