The Dragon Lord

by David Drake

  "Tonight?" Cei blurted.

  "Can we start sooner?" Merlin sneered. He looked at Arthur. "I'll need a man to read the responses," he said. "One who won't run if something goes—"

  "All right, I'll come myself," said the king with a nod. Arthur's attention was on the reliquary.

  Impatience and the nearness of triumph drove Merlin to retort unthinkingly, "Come and read responses? Read? Read?"

  Arthur went white. Maul, hearing the grating sound of drawn steel, looked up swiftly to see which guard would strike the blow. But the king took a deep breath and said, "Of course. I'll send for Lancelot, then. He can read."

  "Mael will read your responses," said Veleda unexpectedly from behind the Irishman. Even Merlin had forgotten her after the casket was opened.

  Mael twisted around to look at her, trying to discern in Veleda's placid expression what she meant to accomplish. There was nothing to be seen. Mael chuckled, acting on instinct. "I'll bet your Lancelot still has trouble talking through the teeth I broke for him before I left," he said. "I'll take care of your responses."

  Merlin's gaze flickered from Veleda to Mael and back again. The wizard frowned. "You think I'd be afraid, don't you?" he asked the woman. "You don't think I'd dare display my powers in front of a—" his wand stroked—"a pawn of yours? We'll see." Merlin's eyes shifted back to Mael. "And you think you'd be able to read Latin letters, Irishman?"

  To a British warrior, the question would have been no insult. The wizard might not even have meant it for one. Mael's head snapped back as if his face had been slapped. The Ard Ri's Guard had been an assemblage of scholars as surely as of athletes, ever since it was founded two centuries before by the great Cormac mac Airt. Mael reacted in much the same way as he would have to a suggestion that he could not out-wrestle an old woman. "My ancestors were kings in Miletos, Briton, when wolves chased your scampering forebears into the trees," he said. "I can read Ogam or Greek letters or Latin. If you British were civilized enough to have a script of your own, I would have learned to read that as well in the High King's school."

  Cei grunted and started to raise his sword. Merlin laid his omnipresent willow switch across the seneschal's wrist without taking his eyes off Mael. The angry Briton froze with a surprised look on his face. Merlin gave Mael an ugly grin. "You think you're a bold man, do you, Irishman?" he said. "You'll have had need to be before this night is out." He turned to Arthur. "We can finish this within the hour if you'll get us horses. I already have everything prepared at the cave in the bluff west of here."

  "The old corral?" Arthur queried.

  "That's right. And I intend to use it as a corral again—though for a very different sort of cattle."

  The king shrugged and called to his guard officer. "Three horses. At once."

  Merlin led, riding faster than the overcast night made safe, in Mael's opinion. The road was well defined but showed few signs of use in the recent past. Cei was stumbling directly behind the wizard, trying to light his king's path with the inadequate lantern. Mael checked to be sure Veleda rode comfortably. She grinned back at him, amused that he even thought she might be having trouble. Mael pressed his horse forward a little to put him alongside Arthur.

  "Where is it we're going?" he asked.

  Arthur's mouth quirked at the suggestion of equality in the question. "There's a row of limestone hills half a mile from the main building," he answered mildly enough. "One of them has a cave in it, a small entrance but a belly the size of a church. It used to be a stable."

  "Umm. Then why don't you use it?"

  The king's smile grew a little broader. "I said," he repeated, "there's one small entrance. I don't want my people to get in the habit of stabling their mounts in places they can't get out of fast. They only have to do that one night on patrol and I've lost a whole sector of border." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Did you really think you had to bring your whore along?" he asked.

  Mael laughed. "Didn't ask her to come," he said, "but I'm glad of her company." He dropped back and rode the rest of the short distance beside Veleda. Neither of them spoke, but Mael knew that he had not lied to Arthur about the companionship.

  The cave was in a long bulk of stone, an outcrop thirty feet high rather than a water-carven bluff. It was not sheer, but its one-to-one slope was too sharp for a man to climb it easily without using his hands. The cave mouth was at ground level, an egg-shaped hole squared off by the addition of door posts and a great iron-strapped gate of hardwood. Merlin dismounted at some distance from the opening. He tied his horse to one of a small copse of poplars. "We'll leave our horses here," he said, explaining, "they don't like to feel—power being used."

  Mael's chest tightened. He did not speak or look at Veleda.

  They all trudged toward the gate in file. Merlin paused and took the reliquary from Mael before he entered the cave. The wizard's eyes met those of the witch woman. "You don't come inside," he snapped. "I know the kind of trouble you'd cause."

  Veleda's hair twitched like the mane of a beast. "Be assured," she said. "that god watches you whether I do or not."

  "God!" Merlin sneered. "God! You don't know—you can't imagine—what I'm about to do!"

  "I suspect that you can't imagine the evil you're about to do," the woman said. "A little knowledge . . . but what will be, will be. Go raise your ravening monster, little man."

  The wizard's eyes clouded. He passed his willow wand between himself and Veleda three times. Without a word he touched the center of her tunic with the leafy end of the branch. Veleda laughed and reached up with her right hand. She broke the tip between her fingers, gripped the center of the wand and snapped it, too, and reached for Merlin's hand. He snatched himself away with a curse and flung the wand out into the darkness.

  Still scowling, he took the lantern from Cei. "You," he said. "You stand out here and see that we aren't disturbed."

  The seneschal stiffened at the tone. He looked doubtfully at Mael, even more doubtfully at the wizard himself. "Leader," he said, "I don't think you ought to go in there alone with—"

  "Do as the man says, Cei," Arthur snapped. "Merlin's doing what I told him to do, and I can handle the Irishman—needs must." The king and Mael eyed each other appraisingly. Then, ducking their heads under the low lintel, they followed Merlin into the cave.

  The single lantern could not illuminate the cavity within. From the opening it expanded so suddenly that Mael suspected parts of the hill face must be eaten almost through. It had been hollowed by water, not the hand of man; wherever the light shone, from the ceiling down the walls to shoulder height, the surface gleamed with the soft pearl of flow rock. Lower down, the dissolved and redeposited calcium carbonate had been worn away or fouled by the beasts stabled in the cave in past times. The air had a still, musty odor. Ancient dung covered the floor, trampled and compacted until it had become almost as dense as the limestone beneath. The cave was over twenty feet wide and its walls stretched back further than the light could follow, but there was no breeze to hint at a second opening to this bubble in the rock.

  As Merlin had said, his paraphernalia was already ordered within. The wizard stepped first to a seven-branched lampstand and began to light the separate wicks with a spill of papyrus. Mael had first assumed the stand was Jewish. As it better illuminated itself, it became obvious that the object was not Jewish at all—not even as Judaism was misunderstood and libeled by gentile sources. Mael had seen worse things than that stand, but it did not mean that he cared for the lovingly crafted abomination.

  The seven lamps displayed the rest of Merlin's gear clearly. Most striking was a brazier resting on a tripod and already laid with sticks of charcoal. A grill was mounted above the fire pan on narrow arms; it was raised more than a foot above the surface of the coals. The metal was black and without decoration, apparently wrought iron.

  Two cases of sturdy wood stood nearby. One was a cylinder whose lid was askew to display a number of scrolls resting endwise within. The winding
rods were tagged, but Mael could not read the titles without making an obvious effort to do so. He kept a rein on his curiosity. Scrolls of both papyrus and vellum were represented. One of the latter had a gilt fore-edge and a pattern of tiny agates set into the knobs of the winding rods.

  The other case was of less common pattern. It was full of chemicals, each in a separate jar in one of the scores of pigeonholes into which the narrow chest was divided. The containers were generally pottery, but a few were stone and one was of glass so clear that a king would have been proud to sip his wine from it. A sliding lid could close the chest, but that had already been untied and leaned against the wall Across the top of the chest was a silver scriber, an arthame, some two feet long. Mael at first mistook the instrument for the weapon it resembled. Then he noticed that the edges of the blade were blunt and that its rippled pattern was only a depiction of a flattened serpent's body. The tail tip, polished with wear, was the point. The head and neck straightened to form a guardless hilt.

  Merlin set the lantern on the floor. His hands twitched absentmindedly. When he realized that they were playing with his missing wand, he cursed under his breath. The wizard plucked a shred of willow bark from under a thumbnail. Shooting a vicious glance at the Irishman, Merlin turned his face to the far end of the cave and muttered an incantation. The lamps cast on the wall the capering shadow of what Mael was blocked from seeing by the wizard's body. When Merlin faced around again, he was holding another willow switch. This one was thin and only a yard long. "The wood has eternal life," the wizard muttered to his audience in fuzzy explanation. He became more alert and looked again at Mael. Then he ran the tip of the wand across the sticks of charcoal in the brazier. Where the willow touched, the black turned white with ash. The brazier itself began to glow and stink of hot iron.

  Mael grinned. His stomach was turning over with the memory of other magic he had watched. "You must be a delight on a winter bivouac," he said.

  Merlin reached into the case of scrolls and took out one of the parchments. "Read this over," he directed Mael. "Not aloud! I have to ready the—rest of this." The wizard set his wand on the box of chemicals and picked up the arthame. Ignoring both men—he had not paid the king any attention since they entered the cave—Merlin began drawing lines and symbols in the lumpy floor. The design was centered on the lighted brazier.

  Mael unrolled the first column-width of the scroll. He began to read. At first he thought there was something wrong with the letters. But no, they were plain enough. It was just that the words they formed made no sense at all. . . . "This isn't in Latin," the Irishman said aloud, thinking Merlin had given him the wrong scroll.

  The wizard looked up from the pentacle he was scribing. He smirked. "I didn't say it was. The letters are Latin; the language itself is a good deal older than Rome, Irishman. Or Miletos."

  Mael frowned but concentrated on the manuscript again. Its format puzzled him until he realized that what he held was a list of long antistrophes, each of them ten or more lines in length. Instead of copying out the strophes as well, the scribe had merely indicated the first speaker with the Greek letter "delta" wherever Mael's portion ended. None of the words made any sense, but Mael felt a compulsion to begin speaking them aloud. His frown deepened.

  Merlin finished scratching on the floor. He set the arthame down and picked up the willow again. "Well," he demanded, "do you think you're ready, Irishman?"

  Mael nodded, refusing to acknowledge either the challenge or the hostility in the wizard's tone. "Yes," he said.

  "Believe me," Merlin went on, "this is no joke. If you start, you have to finish. If you panic, you'll be in worse danger than you can imagine."

  Mael thought of violet serpents lighting the shadowed deck. "I can imagine a lot," he said. "And I don't panic."

  "Then stand over there," Merlin directed, pointing to one of the reentrant angles of the pentacle, "but don't scuff the line. Don't even lean over it after we start."

  Mael obeyed. Heat thrown off by the brazier brushed his legs below the trousers.

  The wizard carefully took the lough monster's skull out of the reliquary. Barehanded he set the yellowed bones on top of the grill. Then he bent over again and took a pinch of something from one of the opened jars of chemicals. When Merlin tossed the powder on the charcoal, orange smoke bloomed up and briefly hid the whole apparatus. The wizard coughed and swore under his breath. He took a pinch of white chemical from another jar. Nothing happened when he cast that as well into the fire. Nodding approval, the wizard plucked another scroll from the case. Finally he took up his position at the peak of the pentagram across the brazier from where Mael stood. He gave the Irishman a grin that was almost a rictus beneath his glazed eyes. Then he began to intone the spell.

  Waiting made Mael nervous despite himself. The wizard's voice was higher than normal when he chanted. The timbre was not so much feminine as bestial, that of a small dog yapping something close to words. Mael shot a glance behind him at the king. Arthur was hunched against the wall of the cave. He had drawn his sword and was resting it point down in the gritty flooring. The king's hands lay on the cross guard and his long fingers were twined around the hilt. Arthur's face was as hard as the steel blade.

  Merlin broke off at the end of the strophe. He dipped his wand at Mael like a choirmaster's baton. Mael gulped his throat clear and began to sound the unfamiliar syllables. At first the Irishman spoke slowly, afraid to misaccent or stumble over the gibberish. When he had begun, though, Mael found his mouth was shaping naturally to the words. They rolled out with a rightness not affected by the fact that they were still unintelligible. Even that was changing subtly. Though the words had no meaning, they left behind them an aura of purpose. When the passage ended, Mael stopped. He was breathing hard and listening with new ears to Merlin taking up the chant. It was only then that Mael realized that the last of the words he had "read" were on the next column of his scroll. He had not unrolled it. His fingers fumbled as he did so.

  Merlin threw something more on the fire as the Irishman began his second passage. A thin, green tendril wound upward toward the ceiling. The smoke trembled like a lutestring at the impact of the readers' voices. The cave was getting colder. Mael thought for a time that the chill was in his imagination, but he noticed puffs of vapor from Merlin's mouth as he read.

  The litany caromed back and forth between the speakers, proceeding toward the end of each scroll. Merlin dusted the fire with further chemicals without any significant effect on the flames or on the chill that utterly permeated the cave. Finally the wizard completed his last invocation and, beating the strokes with his wand, shouted the response aloud with Mael: "Sodaque! Sodaque! SODAQUE!"

  The skull above the coals wavered and collapsed inward. The air was full of the stink of fresh blood. On the grill in place of the dead bones pranced a pigeon-sized creature with strong hams and a pair of wings instead of forelegs. The beast was covered all over with scales, black and with the suggestion of translucent depth that a block of smoky quartz gives. Its head and neck were serpentine. A long tail, thrust out stiffly to balance the weight of the forequarters, was the length of neck and torso together.

  The creature's eyes were small and cruel and a red so intense that it seemed luminous. "My wyvern!" Merlin cried out joyfully. He dropped the scroll and began to dance with his hands clasped above his head. The wyvern launched itself from the grill and sailed around it in a tight circle. One of the scale-jeweled wings spread into the air above a sideline of the pentacle. The beast glanced away as though it had struck a solid wall. Shrieking with high-pitched anger, the wyvern opened its mouth and spurted a needle of azure flame as long as its whole body.

  Mael looked at the capering wizard, then back at the dragon. He stepped away from the pentacle and began to laugh full-throatedly, clutching his sides. It was as much the anticlimax to his fear as the actual ludicrousness of the tiny monster that was working on the Irishman.

  The chirping wyvern had had ye
t a third effect on the king. Arthur's face lost its death-mask placidity. He gaped. Then his expression began to contort with fury. "That?" he shouted. "That will lay the Saxons at my feet?" The king stepped around the pentagram with his sword raised. His eyes were fixed on Merlin.

  The wizard was too caught up in his triumph even to hear the king's words, but the oil lamps threw multiple images of the sword past him to the cave wall. Merlin turned, suddenly sober. "Wait!" he cried. "Leader—it will grow!"

  Mael had backed against the wall. He held his left arm across his body where the tunic sleeve hid his other hand's grip on his dagger hilt. Arthur had paused an instant before striking. Merlin half crouched. His wand was raised, but the fear in his eyes was certain. Whatever the power was he had used to block Cei's hand, the wizard did not care to chance it against his king in a murderous rage. "Leader, this is what I meant to do," he said. He stretched out his left hand in supplication. "Other people have tried to raise dragons full grown. That's dangerous, suicide—nobody but a god, perhaps, can control something that big from the first."

  Arthur did not relax his stance or gaze, but he began to lower his long sword to an on-guard position. The wizard straightened, letting his wand tip fall in turn. "This one—" he used his elbow to indicate the wyvern so as not to break the lock his eyes had gained on Arthur's—"is small and I can control it. It's going to get bigger—very much bigger, you needn't fear. But I'll still have power over it, because the power will increase, too. You'll have your weapon in a few weeks, and you'll have a weapon you can really direct instead of being something all-devouring and masterless. A less able student might have raised a real monster in his ignorance."

  The tension was gone. The wyvern squawked again and perched on the grill. It was apparently oblivious to the heat. Mael said, "You know, I've heard a notion like that before. One of the lordlings in—where I grew up. He decided he'd start lifting a newborn bull calf once a day, so in a year he'd be strong enough to lift a grown bull." Mael grinned at Arthur. "It wasn't near that long before he'd broken his back trying, of course. But it was an interesting notion."