“Yes,” he says. “That monster tore off a large chunk of my pride.”
“A mortal wound for you,” I reply.
“No. I’m not injured.” He runs his hands over his face. “Why, exactly…are we hunting this thing again?”
I shrug. “The only dragon slayers of our time. Something of that nature.”
“We’ve done quite a bit in our time,” he says. “We’re quite selfish really. Young knights need accomplishments, too.”
“And old knights need to find a cure for the plague.”
“Yes, yes, but did you see its teeth, Edward? Those claws?” He shakes his head, then smirks at me. “Besides, alchemy is a sin.”
There is less than an hour of sunlight left, but I resolve not to leave until we have slain the dragon. I recover my sword from where I left it in the ground. The plaguer I pinned to the forest floor with it grasps and hisses, tries to stand. I jam the blade into the back of his skull and he stops moving.
We scour the shore, using leaf-strewn branches to sweep at the fading mist. I feel lightheaded and my wrist throbs with pain. Perhaps that idiot doctor was right. Maybe the stars are not in my favor. I have fought nearly everything there is to fight in Europe and have never been defeated. But a one-inch gash on my flesh threatens to put me in the ground.
“Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow,” Tristan says. “They will throw Sara into the river again. The beast will wander to the village to be pampered and fed. Then we can leap out from the forest and give it a little of God’s Love. See how it enjoys being ambushed.”
I continue walking, waving my branch at the river and holding my sword out toward the water. Tristan lost his sword in the Stour. I think that is the third sword he has lost on our travels.
“We don’t know if the dragon will come for Sara,” I say. “And if it does, it might not come for hours.”
“Of course it will come for her, Edward. No monster can resist a free meal.” He frowns. “I can’t resist a free meal either. Does that make me a monster?”
“No,” I reply. “The things you do and say make you a monster.”
The mist is not so thick now. I spot something in the water. Eyes staring from beneath the river? I reach forward and shake the branch at it. The leaves chatter but the object in the water does not move. I pick up a flint and throw it. The stone glugs and sends a tiny crest of water into the air directly in front of the eyes. But it is no dragon. Just a submerged branch.
“Ed, let’s go back to the village and get a fair night’s rest so we will be ready for the dragon tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if we spend the next two hours walking up and down this river. We won’t see it—it’s too dark. The dragon is going to find us first again. Remember how we fared the last time that happened?”
“It won’t find us first,” I say.
“How can you be so sure of that?”
I point to a row of white teeth that seem to glow in the dark, thirty paces farther up the riverbank. The branches of a shaggy chestnut dip down to the ground by the Stour and the dragon has pulled its upper body onto them.
“We found it first.” Tristan sounds surprised.
I study the creature. It is the first time I have seen it at rest. Its back is studded with rows of squat, stony spikes, like sharpened warts. The size of the monster’s head staggers me. It is nearly as long as my arm, the jaws so wide that I could place my breastplate inside them without touching the creature’s flesh. The eyes sit atop the head like burled knots in petrified bark. Its legs, flopped on either side of the thick body, look ridiculously small: bent things, armored in scales, and clawed. I wonder how they can support the weight of the mighty creature they are attached to.
“How do we get to it,” Tristan says, “without it either slipping into the river or burning us to cinders?”
“I’m not convinced that it breathes fire,” I say.
“It burned down Wormingford.”
“And who told you that, Tristan?” I ask.
“Father Ralf,” he replies. He sees my look and shrugs. “The man who sacrifices women to keep himself safe.”
“So tell me, how would Father Ralf know it burned Wormingford?” I ask. “And if the dragon could breathe fire, don’t you think the priest would have seen it by now? He would have mentioned that when Belisencia asked him if the monster breathed fire.”
“Very strong points,” Tristan says. “But the dragon can refute all of them with one breath.”
“Then why didn’t it?” I ask. “It had us both sitting on the riverbank within a foot of each other. It could have roasted us together. But it didn’t.”
Tristan shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t that hungry. You know how quickly roasts go bad. And it doesn’t look like it has much patience for salting and drying.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t be careful. But I think if it were going to burn us, it would have done so earlier.”
“Very well, Sir George,” Tristan says. “So how do we slay it?”
“The same way it tried to slay us.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” Tristan says. “But I’m not going to be the one that bites it.”
Chapter 30
We creep through the forest slowly, as silently as we are capable, inching forward with infinite patience. Knights are not good at moving silently through forests. Tristan and I break branches and shatter leaves no matter how slowly we walk. But fortunately dragons do not seem to have good hearing. We reach the chestnut upon whose branches the dragon rests and I glimpse the white blades of the creature’s teeth in the dying light. I can only just see Tristan at my left. The waxing moon turns the river to quicksilver, but in the forest there is only pitch. There will be no other chances tonight. I must kill it now, or Elizabeth loses another day. And I do not think she has many days left.
I skulk forward, my sword wrapped in a cloak I tore from a dead plaguer. The dragon is less than three paces from me. The creature looks more evil now that the night has leeched the color from it. It is a black demon on the riverbank, and I have come for its blood.
I take one more crunching step and stop when the dragon’s head swings to one side. It has heard us. Or perhaps it has known of our presence all along but will not tolerate us to come any closer. A gap in the branches allows me an unobstructed view of the beast. I hope I am right about the flames. The creature lies motionless again, its massive head tilted away from us. Perhaps it sees from the side, like falcons.
I nod to Tristan.
“How did I end up as the bait?” he whispers.
“Because we know that it likes the taste of you.” My whisper sounds metallic in the great helm.
Tristan rises and creeps away slowly. If the dragon hears him, it does not react. Tristan slinks farther to my left, a choir of snapping branches, mashed leaves, and clinking metal. The dragon does not move.
When Tristan is ten paces from me, he turns toward the river and trudges forward. He looks my way and crosses himself. He is joking but I know there is terror in his heart. The dragon nearly killed him last time.
He reaches the riverbank and rises to his full height ten paces from the monster. I wonder how fast the beast is on land.
“What say we try this again, you ugly serpent?” he says. The dragon does not react. “I was named after a dragon slayer, Sir Tristan, who slew a dragon much larger than you to win a princess.”
The dragon remains motionless.
“You’re nothing like Tristan’s dragon.” He jumps up and down, making his armor clatter. “I’ll be lucky to get a one-legged whore for the night when I kill you.”
The dragon turns its head toward me and I imagine that it is looking at Tristan now.
“Didn’t like that, did you?” Tristan laughs. “Maybe I’ll tie a rope around your mouth and lead you into the village, like Saint George did before killing your kin.”
The beast pivots toward Tristan and hisses, its mouth opening like a trapdoor to hell. I rise to my feet slowly.
&
nbsp; Tristan hunches down and stares into the caverns of the creature’s mouth. I can hear his breathing from here. Nothing stands between him and the dragon. One burst of flame can turn Tristan to charcoal. But I know I am right about the fire. Nothing in this forest has been burned.
I pray I am right about the fire.
I creep forward and draw my sword from the cloak, place the fabric on the ground silently. The dragon’s mouth is still open and it still faces Tristan. I have one chance. I may never get another opportunity like this. I take a long, slow, quiet breath. I think of Elizabeth and crouch.
“Pity of you, dragon,” I whisper.
And I leap.
Dragons are faster than they look. Those flimsy legs at their sides are capable of quick, powerful movements. The monster lurches to one side and then back toward the water as I crash down with an overhead thrust of my sword. The shift to the side was a bit of tactical brilliance by the beast, because the thrust of my blade does not end in the creature’s spine as I had hoped. The sword buries itself halfway into the soft clay of the riverbank. But the dragon does not escape cleanly.
One of the floppy, clawed legs gets between the blade and the ground.
Saint Giles’s sword pierces the scales, cuts through flesh, splinters bone and severs the foot. The dragon’s mouth springs open and a rattling, guttural roar—so powerful that I feel the wind of it through my visor—shreds the quiet night. If it were ever going to breathe fire, this would be the time. I cover my helmet with one arm and raise the sword for a second strike.
The dragon slips backward, roaring once more. My sword cuts a gash into its snout before the beast slips into the Stour. I dive forward and slash again, but the blade cuts only water as the dragon pulls its legs flush to its body and the massive tail catapults it downstream.
“I see it!” Tristan shouts. He runs downstream, stepping over branches and pushing through shrubs. “Hurry!”
The dragon shows up well: a deep black shape among the bright shine of the moonlit river. Much of the mist has lifted and we track it downstream.
It moves swiftly, curling its body from side to side and thrashing its tail. We follow it, crashing through the underbrush until we come to a jumble of massive stones that lie against the river. We try to clamber over them, but clambering and armor are things that do not go well together. I peer over the first boulder and watch as the dragon slips to the side of the river and disappears in a watery hole beneath one of the massive stones.
“It’s under the rocks,” I say. “It’s trapped itself.”
“I believe what you mean to say,” Tristan replies, “is that it has entered its lair to await our arrival so it may eat us.”
He shoves me up onto the boulder and I pull him up after me. His breastplate scrapes against the stone as he struggles to his knees and stands beside me. I can just see the dragon hole from where I stand. A small, waterlogged cavern at the base of the rocks. We would have to wade the river to enter. I am not certain I can fit comfortably inside the cave with my armor. And I am not certain I want to try.
“It’ll die now,” I say. “Won’t it? It will bleed to death.”
“I’m not certain,” Tristan replies. “It doesn’t seem like a creature that would die from losing a foot.”
I dwell on the likelihood of such a wound killing the dragon, watching the underwater cave for any sign of the monster. “Course it will die,” I say. “Remember that Danish king who killed the dragon? Tore its arm off and the beast scurried away to die?”
“That was Beowulf,” Tristan replies, “and he tore the arm off a different sort of creature. The dragon killed Beowulf.”
“Oh.” I stare at the cave again. I do not want to fight this creature anymore.
The river brushes the boulders, but there is a tiny jut of soggy land just downstream of us with a scattering of smaller boulders upon it. An idea comes to me.
I navigate along the ridge until I am directly above the jut of land. It is six feet down.
“Lower me,” I say.
Tristan takes my hand and lowers me slowly. This would be a terrible time for the dragon to emerge from the cave. I watch the opening in the rocks carefully as I descend. When I land, my boots squish onto the grassy earth.
“Come down,” I say.
Tristan lays flat against the rock, belly down, and clambers toward me. I glance into the cave. Something white glimmers. Is that a tooth? I grab Tristan’s legs, my eyes on the cave, and guide him downward. “Hurry up!”
Tristan slides down to the soggy earth and draws his dagger. I point to the rocks on the ground. “Help me with these boulders.”
We lift one of the larger ones. It is about the size and shape of an anvil. We lug it toward the cave, swing it back and forth a few times and hurl it toward the opening. It lands with a splash that soaks us both, but the stone blocks part of the entrance.
“We could have been the only dragon slayers of our time,” Tristan says as we heave another boulder from off the ground.
“No, you were right,” I reply. “We should leave some accomplishments for the younger knights.” We hurl the boulder toward the cave and it lands crookedly but blocks more of the cavern entrance. “Besides,” I say, “it will die in there. So we are just slaying it slowly.”
“One more boulder ought to do it,” Tristan says.
We pick one with a shape similar to the opening that is left in the cavern, but it is half-buried. We dig with our fingers.
“Dig faster, Edward,” Tristan says.
I glance at the cavern and can just make out a row of white teeth. I dig faster.
We rock the stone back and forth until it is free from the earth, then roll it to the water’s edge. The white teeth move and the moonlight shines off a bleeding snout.
“Hurry!” I say. We groan and lift the boulder, stagger into the knee-deep water.
“It’s coming out!” Tristan shouts.
The head of the dragon peers out from the cave. It opens the great mouth again, and I imagine a gout of flame spraying out. I imagine my armor growing red hot, my skin searing to the metal, flames flooding through my eye slits and breathing holes, melting the flesh of my face.
“Throw it!” I shout.
We swing the boulder back once, then hurl it as the dragon crouches and readies itself to spring. I fall to my hands and knees in the water with the effort.
Perhaps the creature’s missing foot keeps it from springing. Or maybe it simply feels safe in the cavern. I do not know how dragons think, but the beast doesn’t leave its cave. It lowers itself onto its belly, floating in the water, and backs into the cavern as the boulder falls and seals the monster into its tomb.
Chapter 31
The little boy still plays with his boat outside the church. His eyes are even wider when he looks at us. We are caked in mud. Our armor is gouged and scraped from the rocks. Tristan bears monstrous teeth marks on his right cuisse and across the tasset and fauld that sit upon his waist.
“I suppose Saint George was spotless after his dragon?” Tristan says without looking at the child. We wade through the puddle, overturning his boat, and enter the church.
Belisencia and the old woman still sit in the frontmost pew. Belisencia runs to us and hugs Tristan tightly, then she backs away, clears her throat, and embraces me. Not as tightly.
She looks us up and down and covers her mouth with her hand. “You look awful. Are you hurt?”
We remove our helmets, and I shake my head. “Nothing that a pint of beer won’t cure.”
“Ith it done?” the old woman says.
Tristan nods. “We have thlain the therpent that thtalkth the River Thtour,” he says.
The woman squints and cocks her head. “What?”
“Yes, it is done.” I throw the dragon’s foot onto the floor in front of her. “The beast will never bother this village again.”
The woman cackles. “You did it! By God and Mary, you did it!”
“We have fulfille
d our part of the bargain, old woman,” I say. “Now take us to the simpleton.”
The woman stops laughing. She studies me for a long moment, then nods. “I will take you to him.”
She pulls the woolen shawl over her head again and we leave the church. The boy picks up the boat when he sees us and follows.
We walk around the church, past a small cemetery, and toward a field crowded with wet sheep in their thick summer coats. The woman takes us to a stone wall bordering the field and points to a rotted wooden hut in the distance. “There,” she says. “The thimpleton lieth there.”
“He lives in that rotting husk?” I study the building. It looks abandoned. A sheep bleats in the distance.
“No,” she replies. “There.” And I see what she is actually pointing at: a crudely cut tombstone jutting from the earth like the old woman’s single tooth.
“The thimpleton was the dragonth firtht victim.”
EPISODE 6
Chapter 32
I am plagued.
I have no direction. No thoughts. No reason. Only a hunger for something that I will never have. A driving, mindless hunger for the smile of a woman who will never smile again. The rain lashes down, drenching me, the drops striking distant leaves like muffled laughter. The world laughs at me. I am a lost soul, and I will wander purgatory for eternity. My mind has nothing to bind it to this world.
The third plague has found me.
It is difficult to see tears in a driving rain, but I slip the great helm over my head anyway, sealing my grief within its metal walls. I fasten the strap without taking my eyes from the crooked gravestone that lies only a caber toss away.
“Go,” I say, but no one notices. “Go! Leave me!”
“Edward.” Tristan places a hand on my shoulder, his mailed gauntlet grating against my pauldron.
I shrug the hand off and push him backward, roughly. “Leave me! Go away! Go!”
“There is still ho—”
“Get away from me!” I do not want to hear the word that Tristan was about to speak. Not when the only link to the alchemist is a crudely carved, half-buried granite slab. Tristan’s jaw tightens. He stares at me, a bead of water dangling from the tip of his nose. He nods, dislodging the droplet. “I’ll be in the tavern.” He trudges back toward the village. Belisencia embraces me and follows, the old woman not far behind.
Nostrum (The Scourge, Book 2) Page 17
