Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

Boiled down, then, the raid had been intended to reestablish the status-quo before the city-states went to arms in order to re-establish it themselves. And, the dragons, she had said, were dead — dead in their enclosures behind the pit. Pausing with a piece of wild honeycomb in his fingers, Jon-Joras asked about that.

“How were the dragons killed, Ma’am Anna? I heard no gunfire. No one could have gotten a good shot by the torchlight, anyway. Besides, they were all marked wrong.”

She nodded, supped noisily from her bowl. After a moment, she wiped her toothless mouth, said, “That’s another thing, you see. Hue and his rogues. Rogue drags can be as bothersome as soldieries, yesindeed. I daresay he intends they all go downriver, towards the hunting country. I suppose he does his best to drive them so. But they don’t, me cockerel, no, they don’t always stay drove…

“How were they killed? Why, we poisoned them. Never mind what poison. Leave at least one of us be able to eat with an easy mind.” She bent over in a spasm of silent laughter.

Breakfast over, the day quite on its way and the sun warmer, Ma’am Anna had the curtains of the litter drawn back and relinquished a layer or two of her coverings. The signal horn sounded, and the nomads got on their way once more. Far off in the bosky distance a faint smudge showed in the air on the horizon. The black stones of the sinister, alien Kar-chee castle would not burn, but just about everything the outlaw Doghunters had carried into it was flammable.

“How did Hue get his scar, do you know?”

Her wrinkled lips came together in a pout. She shook her head. “That was bad, yesindeed. Someone with an — ix to the tail of his name — this was when Hue was just small of size — decided he didn’t find him meek enough. Maybe was drunk, too. However it was, he picked him up by the scruff and tossed him in with a dragon-cockerel that he happened to have around. The cockerel was bigger than Hue was… I don’t altogether blame the man. Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them.”

It was not a barn, exactly, which was burning back there. Her eyes followed his and, evidently, her thoughts, too. “Do they have dragons where you come from, coney?

“No. No, I suppose not. Because you never had no bloody Karches, did you, then? Lucky you. Did you know that they turn into Karches in the night-times? Yesindeed. So you be careful, hear me now, in wandering off in the dark. Particularly if we gets near unto The Bosky. Fierce, terribly fierce, is them Bosky drags.”

Jon-Joras, torn between his desire to hear more of this new aspect of the legend — the dragon as were-Kar-chee — and his desire to hear more of the almost unknown land beyond the official territories of the city-states, decided that if he let her talk he might well hear of both. Which he did.

The nomads apparently knew very well that the dragons were not Kar-chee. How Hue and Hue’s people had formed the notion that they were, Jon-Joras could not guess and didn’t now try. The notion that at certain times and in certain places the dragons shifted their shapes into those of the long since departed Kar-chee was perhaps, however, not much more scientific. If at all.

“… they even changes their smell, me cockerel,” old Ma‘am Anna hissed, wide-eyed in emphasis.

“I know how dragons smell, but how do… how did the—”

“The damned and bloody Karches? You knows that, too. You was in their castle for sure enough, yes indeed.”

Was that faint and alien odor that he had noticed, then, indeed that of the castle-keeping Kar-chee? Faint, faint, so very faint — yet still so distinct. The thought alone was capable of evoking it. Could it have lingered all these centuries? He could not say, could not begin, even, to conjecture. And, as for The Bosky—

Time and time again nomad bands had desired to graze their flocks on the rich and untouched grasses there. But the dragons were so incomparably fiercer in that region that it was long since any herdsmen had even thought of trying. Too, in times past, free farmers — individually and in groups and leagues — had endeavoured either to settle in The Bosky or at at least to pass through it in search of regions where the Syndics’ writs did not run. Where farm land might stay farm land and not become a target-alley or a parade-ground, where potatoes might stay where planted until harvested and not be dug up and trampled into muck because they had impinged on dragon ground. That curious and strange loving hate existing between hunters and hunted… Off, then, their gear and baggage laden aboard crude wagons and on pack-horses, did they have any; or bending beneath the weight themselves, did they have none, the free-farmers had set off for finding places where they might be free indeed and farmers indeed and need nevermore be “dirty doghunters” save on their own account.

“Some come back quicker than they went, young outworlder. It made them content to suffer what they’d suffered in discontent but where the dragons don’t fight unless they’re coaxed or goaded. I says, ‘It made them…’ What did? Why to see how terrible them awful Bosky drags tore up them as went before them. In their blood they saw them, yesindeed, mere bones and shreds,” Ma’am Anna sighed.

Jon-Joras caught at a word. “‘Some’ came back, you say—?”

“You mean, and what’s of the others? Isn’t it clear? Them as was found torn and scattered, was them that never come back.”

He frowned and mused. There was nothing utterly impossible in this account, nothing of the historical absurdity of confusing Kar-chee with dragon nor of the physical impossibility of the one turning into the other and back again, so. But there remained one considerable question which alone put the whole matter into doubt.

“Are the dragons any bigger or any different there than here?”

“Nope.” Ma’am Anna smacked her gums. “Just fiercer, like I say.”

“But…” And this was it: “Why should they be fiercer there? I mean, with no one to hunt them and bother them, you’d think they’d be less fierce, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, with inflexible logic; “because I knows they be more fierce. As to why, hee hum, old as I am and not fit for much, rather than go and maybe find out and be made into salad meat, by your leave, me coney, I’ll stay over here and in ignorance.”

And there the matter rested.

They were due to meet up with the main horde at about noon; and, at about noon, they did. The camp was, like a Gentleman’s seat, a small city-state of its own. Tents and lean-tos dotted the area for about a mile, the small animals from which the fleeces evidently came milled and bleated, and ponies by the thousands — so it seemed — grazed in hobbles. And in the center was the great circular tent which was the Ma’am’s capitol.

“Mutton!” she directed, as she was being lifted down.

“I want me fat mutton — grilled and crisp and chopped fine!”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“And tomorrow I want the flocks taken up to the white stony brook — that was all burnt over a while back, should be nice, fresh grazing.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“Tomorrow. Not today. Today I want the children to go up there instead. Have ’em bring all the buckets and baskets — there’ll be good berrying there.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

They set her down on a pile of fleeces and blankets raised off the floor, propped her up with pillows.

“Did Cuthy beg Brun’s pardon, publicly, like I said?”

“He did, our Ma’am.”

“Paid him twelve goats, too?”

“Twelve goats, our Ma’am. He wanted to include a wether, and Brun wouldn’t have it, but the Elders said a goat was a goat, so he took it, rather than do without.”