Dragon's Bane
Page 27
She did not remember sleeping afterward. But she woke
to the warmth of sunlight on her hair. Through the open
Gates of the Deep, she could see the looming rock face
of the cliffs outside drenched with cinnabar and gold by
the afternoon's slanted light. Turning her head, she saw
that the dragon had moved and lay sleeping also, great
wings folded once more and his chin upon his foreclaws
like a dog. In the shadows, he was nearly invisible. She
could not see that he breathed, but wondered if she ever
had. Did dragons breathe?
Lassitude flooded her, burying her like silk-fine sand.
The last of the tabat leaves had burned out of her veins,
and that exhaustion added to the rest. Scraped, drained,
wrung, she wanted only to sleep again, hour after hour,
for days if possible.
But she knew it was not possible. She had saved Mor-
keleb, but was under no illusion that this would let her
sleep safely in his presence, once he had regained a little
of his strength. A detached thread of amusement at herself
Dragonsbane 215
made her chuckle; lan and Adric, she thought, would
boast to each other and every boy in the village that their
mother could go to sleep in a dragon's lair—that is, if she
ever made it back to tell them of it. Even rolling over hurt
her bones. The weight of her clothes and her hair dragged
at her like chain mail as she stood.
She stumbled to the Gates and stood for a moment,
leaning against the rough-hewn granite of the vast pillar,
the dry, moving freedom of the air fingering her face.
Turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder and
met the dragon's open eyes. Their depths stared into hers
for one instant, crystalline flowers of white and silver,
like glittering wells of rage and hate. Then they slid shut
again. She walked from the shadows out into the brilliance
of the evening.
Her mind as well as her body felt numbed as she walked
slowly back through Deeping. Everything seemed queer
and changed, the shadow of each pebble and weed a thing
of new and unknown significance to her, as if for years
she had walked half-blind and now had opened her eyes.
At the northern side of the town, she climbed the rocks
to the water tanks, deep black pools cut into the bones
of the mountain, with sun flashing on their opaque sur-
faces. She stripped and swam, though the water was very
cold. Afterward she lay for a long time upon her spread-
out clothing, dreaming she knew not what. Wind tracked
across her bare back and legs like tiny footprints, and the
sun-dance changed in the pool as shadows crept across
the black water. She felt it would have been good to cry,
but was too weary even for that.
In time she got up, put on her clothes again, and returned
to camp. Gareth was asleep, sitting with his knees drawn
up and his face upon them on his crossed arms, near the
glowing ashes of the fire.
Jenny knelt beside John, feeling his hands and face.
They seemed warmer, though she could detect no surface
216 Barbara Hambly
blood under the thin, fair skin. Still, his eyebrows and
the reddish stubble of his beard no longer seemed so dark.
She lay down beside him, her body against his beneath
the blankets, and fell asleep.
In the drowsy warmth of half-waking, she heard John
murmur, "I thought that was you calling me." His breath
was no more than a faint touch against her hair. She blinked
into waking. The light had changed again. It was dawn.
She said, "What?" and sat up, shaking back the thick
weight of her hair from her face. She still felt tired to
death, but ravenously hungry. Gareth was kneeling by the
campfire, tousled and unshaven with his battered spec-
tacles sliding down the end of his nose, making griddle-
cakes. She noted that he was better at it than John had
ever been.
"I thought you were never waking up," he said.
"I thought I was never waking up either, my hero,"
John whispered. His voice was too weak to carry even
that short distance, but Jenny heard him and smiled.
She climbed stiffly to her feet, pulled on her skirt again
over her creased shift, laced her bodice and put on her
boots, while Gareth set water over the coals to boil for
coffee, a bitter black drink popular at Court. When Gareth
went to fetch more water from the spring in the woods
beyond the wrecked well house. Jenny took some of the
boiling water to renew John's poultices, welcoming the
simplicity of human healing; and the smell of herbs soon
filled the little clearing among the ruins, along with the
warm, strange smell of the drink. John fell asleep again,
even before Jenny had finished with the bandages, but
Gareth fetched her some bannocks and honey and sat
with her beside the breakfast fire.
"I didn't know what to do, you were gone so long,"
he said around a mouthful ofmealcake. "I thought about
following you—that you might need help—but I didn't
Dragonsbane 217
want to leave John alone. Besides," he added with a rueful
grin, "I've never managed to rescue you from anything
yet."
Jenny laughed and said, "You did right."
"And the promise you made?"
"I kept it."
He let out his breath with a sigh and bowed his head,
as if some great weight that had been pressing down upon
him had been lifted. After a while he said shyly, "While
I was waiting for you, I made up a song... a ballad. About
the slaying of Morkeleb, the Black Dragon of Nast Wall.
It isn't very good..."
"It wouldn't be," Jenny said slowly, and licked the
honey from her fingers. "Morkeleb is not dead."
He stared at her, as he once had when she had told
him that John had killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr with
an ax. "But I thought—wasn't your promise to John to—
to slay him if—if John could not?"
She shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair snagging
in the grubby fleece of her jacket collar. "My promise was
to Morkeleb," she said. "It was to heal him."
Collecting her feet beneath her, she rose and walked
over to John once more, leaving Gareth staring after her
in appalled and unbelieving bewilderment.
A day passed before Jenny returned to the Deep. She
stayed close to the camp, taking care of John and washing
clothes—a mundane task, but one that needed to be done.
Somewhat to her surprise, Gareth helped her in this,
fetching water from the spring in the glade, but without
his usual chatter. Knowing she would need her strength,
she slept a good deal, but her dreams were disquieting.
Her waking hours were plagued with a sense of being
watched. She told herself that this was simply because
Morkeleb, waking, had extended his awareness across
the Vale and knew where they were, but certain under-
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bsp; 218 Barbara Hambly
standings she had found within the mazes of the dragon's
mind would not allow her to believe this.
She was aware that Gareth was watching her, too,
mostly when he thought she wasn't looking.
She was aware of other things, as well. Never had she
felt so conscious of the traces and turnings of the wind,
and of the insignificant activities of the animals in the
surrounding woods. She found herself prey to strange
contemplation and odd knowledge of things before unsus-
pected—how clouds grow, and why the wind walked the
way it did, how birds knew their way south, and why, in
certain places of the world at certain times, voices could
be heard speaking indistinctly in empty air. She would
have liked to think these changes frightened her because
she did not understand them, but in truth the reason she
feared them was because she did.
While she slept in the late afternoon, she heard Gareth
speak to John of it, seeing them and understanding through
the depths of her altered dreams.
"She healed him," she heard Gareth whisper, and was
aware of him squatting beside the tangle of bearskins and
plaids where John lay. "I think she promised to do so, in
trade for his letting her past him to fetch the medicines."
John sighed and moved one bandaged hand a little
where it lay on his chest. "Better, maybe, she had let me
die."
"Do you think..." Gareth swallowed nervously and
cast a glance at her, as if he knew that asleep, she still
could hear. "Do you think he's put a spell on her?"
John was silent for a time, looking up at the gulfs of
sky above the Vale, thinking. Though the air down here
was still, great winds racked the upper atmosphere, herd-
ing piled masses of cloud, charcoal gray and blinding white,
up against the shaggy flanks of the mountains. At length
he said, "I think I'd feel it, if there were another mind
controlling hers. Or I'd like to flatter myself to thinking
Dragonsbane 219
I'd feel it. They say you should never look into a dragon's
eyes, lest he put a spell on you. But she's stronger than
that."
He turned his head a little and looked at where she
lay, squinting to focus his shortsighted brown eyes upon
her. The bare flesh on either side of the bandages on his
arms and chest was livid with bruises and pitted with tiny
scabs where the broken links of the mail shirt had been
dragged through it. "When I used to dream of her, she
didn't look the same as in waking. When I was delirious,
I dreamed of her—it's as if she's grown more herself, not
less."
He sighed and looked back at Gareth. "I used to be
jealous other, you know. Not of another man, but jealousy
of herself, of that part other she'd never give me—though
God knows, back in those days, what I wanted it for. Who
was it who said that jealousy is the only vice that gives
no pleasure? But that was the first thing I had to leam
about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about
anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is
of her choosing, and the more precious because of it.
Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm,
but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and
its choice to be there—are gone."
From there Jenny slid into deeper dreams of the crush-
ing darkness of Ylferdun and the deep magic she sensed
slumbering in the Places of Healing. As if from a great
distance, she saw her children, her boys, whom she had
never wanted to conceive but had borne and birthed for
John's sake, but loved uneasily, unwillingly, and with des-
perately divided heart. With her wizard's sight she could
see them sitting up in their curtained bed in the darkness,
while wind drove snow against the tower walls; not sleep-
ing at all, but telling one another tales about how their
father and mother would slay the dragon and ride back
with pack trains and pack trains of gold.
220 Barbara Hambly
She woke when the sun lay three-quarters down the
sky toward the flinty crest of the ridge. The wind had
shifted; the whole Vale smelled of sharp snow and pine
needles from the high slopes. The air in the lengthening
slaty shadows was cold and damp.
John was asleep, wrapped in every cloak and blanket
in the camp. Gareth's voice could be heard in the woods
near the little stone fountain, tunelessly singing romantic
lyrics of passionate love for the edification of the horses.
Moving with her habitual quiet, Jenny laced up her bod-
ice and put on her boots and her sheepskin jacket. She
thought about eating something and decided not to. Food
would break her concentration, and she felt the need of
every fragment of strength and alertness that she could
muster.
She paused for a moment, looking around her. The old,
uneasy sensation of being watched returned to her, like
a hand touching her elbow. But she sensed, also, the faint
tingling of Morkeleb's power in the back of her mind and
knew that the dragon's strength was returning far more
quickly than that of the man he had almost slain.
She would have to act and act now, and the thought
of it filled her with fear.
"Save a dragon, slave a dragon," Caerdinn had said.
Her awareness of how small her own powers were ter-
rified her, knowing what it was against which she must
pit them. So this, in the end, was what she had paid for
John's love, she told herself, with a little wry amusement.
To go into a battle she could not hope to win. Involuntarily
another part of her thought at once that at least it wasn't
John's life, but her own, that would be forfeit, and she
shook her head in wonderment at the follies of love. No
wonder those with the power were warned against it, she
thought.
As for the dragon, she had a sense, almost an instinct,
of what she must do, alien to her and yet terrifyingly clear.
Dragonsbane 221
Her heart was hammering as she selected a scruffy plaid
from the top of the pile over John. The thin breezes flut-
tered at its edges as she slung it around her; its colors
faded into the muted hues of weed and stone as she made
her way silently down the ridge once more and took the
track for the Deep.
Morkeleb no longer lay in the Market Hall. She fol-
lowed the scent of him through the massive inner doors
and along the Grand Passage—a smell that was pungent
but not unpleasant, unlike the burning, metallic reek of
his poisons. The tiny echoes of her footfalls were like far-
off water dripping in the silent vaults of the passage—
she knew Morkeleb would hear them, lying upon his gold
in the darkness. Almost, she thought, he would hear the
pounding of her heart.
As Dromar had said, the dragon was laired in the Tem-
<
br /> ple of Sarmendes, some quarter-mile along the passage.
The Temple had been built for the use of the children of
men and so had been wrought into the likeness of a room
rather than a cave. From the chryselephantine doors Jenny
looked about, her eyes piercing the absolute darkness
there, seeing how the stalagmites that rose from the floor
had been cut into pillars, and how walls had been built
to conceal the uneven shape of the cavern's native rock.
The floor was smoothed all to one level; the statue of the
god, with his lyre and his bow, had been sculpted of white
marble from the royal quarries of Istmark, as had been
his altar with its carved garlands. But none of this could
conceal the size of the place, nor the enormous, irregular
grandeur of its proportions. Above those modestly clas-
sical walls arched the ceiling, a maze of sinter and crystal
that marked the place as nature's work timidly home-
steaded by man.
The smell of the dragon was thick here, though it was
clean of offal or carrion. Instead the floor was heaped
with gold, all the gold of the Deep, plates, holy vessels,
222 Barbara Hambly
reliquaries of forgotten saints and demigods, piled between
the pillars and around the statues, tiny cosmetic pots
smelling of balsam, candlesticks quivering with pendant
pearls like aspen leaves in spring wind, cups whose rims
flashed with the dark fire of jewels, a votive statue of
Salemesse, the Lady of Beasts, three feet high and solid
gold... All the things that gnomes or men had wrought
of that soft and shining metal had been gathered there
from the farthest tunnels of the Deep. The floor was like