Avram Davidson: Rogue Dragon

“Where was the dragon hunt yesterday? Near the Lie village?” He went to a map on the wall and marked it with a piece of charcoal. “Tell me about it. All about it.”

His gaunt, scarred face remained impassive, but his tiny eyes glittered under his Medusa’s brows. Then he was silent a while.

“All right,” he said, answering an unspoken question. “Here it is, see. What justifies the Gentlemen, that they lives on others’ labor and does what they likes with others? Why — they hunts drags. Yes. And the drag is terrible big and terrible dangerous. Isn’t he? Of course. You has to go out after him with beaters and musics and bannermen and archers and guns. Yes. And to make damned sure that you kills him, you takes him when he’s a chick and marks him with acid — feels carefully for that certain spot and paints the X so the crux is right over it. Correct?”

Jon-Joras nodded.

“All right,” said Hue. “Now. If the Gentlemen really had any interest in putting down dragons, they’d have the chick-boys kill ’em… and not mark ’em. Right?”

“Yes, of course — but you’re making a point that no one needs to have made. Of course they preserve dragons, the whole place is nothing but one big game preserve.”

Hue said, “Right. And they’s the game wardens. And what’re we? Poachers? We lives here, too. Haven’t we got no rights? No. None. Once in ten years, maybe, one of us is lucky enough to get took on as a servant to a Gentleman. And once in, maybe a hundred years, some servant is lucky enough to get made a Gentleman—”

“Roedeskant!”

“Yes… Roedeskant… Does he remember what his grandser was? His stick is heavier against us than anyone’s. Or was. Don’t know, yet, if he got away alive. But, to go back. The drags, now—”

His flat voice droned on. But Jon-Joras was far from being bored at what Hue had to tell him, told him with the endless attention to and reiteration of detail which only the monomaniac is capable of. Distilled, it amounted to a realization that the dragon, if left alone, was harmless: a sort of gigantic chicken, with no brain to speak of.

No one needed beaters to go round up sundi so that they would come and be hunted; it was not necessary to tease and to confuse dire-falcon with banners and musics and archers.

The entire principle of the ritual murder which constituted a dragon hunt was misdirection. Anyone in good health and who could keep his head, could manage to stay out of a dragon’s way — if the dragon was not goaded into frenzy. Such skill as there was in a hunt was mostly on the part of the bannermen. The function of the archers was only to goad the beast — and create a picturesque pattern of arrows on his hide — and make him rear upright, so that his X-mark was exposed. Anyone who could hit a moving target could kill a dragon.

And the dragon was thus always killed.

Wasn’t it?

Pea-brained as the species was, the individual members were still, like any creature, capable of learning something from experience. But no dragon was allowed to do so, under the Hunt system. All talk of small, feeble Man the Hunter pitting himself against the skill and cunning of the great dragon was cant and hypocrisy. The novice dragon had neither skill nor cunning, just his teeth, his talons, and his weight. Now and then it had happened, over the years, that some trembling finger on the trigger did manage to miss. If the dragon then turned and ran from the guns, his one vulnerable spot no longer visible — if the same dragon, escaped, was unlucky enough to come across another hunt — and again escape—

“Why, then, boy, you got the one thing that every Gentleman fears more than anything in the world. You got a dragon that knows better. You got a rogue dragon!”

Light blazed in Jon-Joras’s mind. His body, which had been drooping with stiffness and with pain, jerked straight upright. “And that’s what you’re doing here!” He cried. “In the dragon pit — you’re training rogues!”

Hue’s scarred head nodded, nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the dragon pits. We’re training rogues. We’re training the drags so that they’ll know better than to be distracted by banner-wefts and music. We’re training them so that they won’t waste time plucking at arrows. By the time we’re done and he’s ready to be released, you’ve got a dragon that’s what the Master Huntsmen claim every drag really is.” His voice sank and his thin, lipless mouth opened wide.

“And aren’t they surprised…” he whispered.

Memories of that “surprise,” the terror and the panic and the bloody slaughter, made Jon-Joras wince and shudder. But another memory, at first as small and nagging as a grain of sand under an eyelid, grew and grew and became large. “But a rogue dragon,” he said, slowly, “is still only a dragon. It may have learned cunning, but, physically, it is the same. Training hasn’t changed the fact that if you put a shot through a certain place, it dies. I pierced that rogue yesterday, myself. At least a hundred shots pierced it… the crux of the X-mark was obliterated, it was a bloody pulp… but the dragon didn’t die. Why not?”

Hue looked at him, relishing the moment. “Why not? Why, because it’s true the dragon’s body hadn’t changed. But something else was changed. Not in the body. On the body. We don’t take drags that the Gentlemen have already fixed for themselves. Wouldn’t be fools if we did. Oh, no. We got our own chick-boys. And we finds our own chicks…”

Faintly, faintly, conscious of the cold creeping over him, Jon-Joras saw Aëlorix looking at the dragon-cockerel, saw the acid-burned finger of the old marky pointing at the X-mark, heard the words, “Look where he put it, too!”

“It’s only a matter of a few inches,” Hue said. “A difference you can’t see when you’re looking up from below, and all excited with the hunt. Only a few inches, yes, boy, but it might as well be a few miles.”

Everything else that Hue told him seemed an anticlimax, though he would have found it exciting enough if he had heard it without the other. There had always been outlaw bands of one sort or another in the forest. But previously, generally, they had been content to remain in the forest.

The one now established in the old Kar-chee castle, however, had no such intentions.

And now a thought which had for some time not been far from the surface of Jon-Joras’s mind rose to his lips as well. The old Kar-chee castle…

“But I don’t see,” he began slowly, then proceeded more rapidly; “I don’t see how, if the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say—”

“They are! They are! I do say! No man alive knows more about they, boy, than I do. Dragons had been my science, boy, my library. I know what I tell you.” His thin, almost invisible lips curled away from his teeth.

Jon-Joras, who had paused, brushed his black hair from his forehead, and went on, in part repeating himself in order to complete his question: “If the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say, how is that the Kar-chee could have used them as — so to speak — dogs, to hunt the people down with?”

Hue’s fierceness was somewhat abated by his genuine puzzlement. His perplexity did not seem that of one who merely did not know an answer, rather it was the baffled attitude which comes from inability to understand the question. “What you mean, boy? That’s what the drags was— Karches.”

Now it was Jon-Joras’s surprised incapacity to comprehend. “But the Kar-chee were not dragons—”

“Course they was! What else was they?”

Jon-Joras gestured. “Back down there, near where I slept last night, there’s a frieze—”