Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

Thus, the strange Bosky, and was it the strangest thing of all on this strange planet believed by most of humankind to be their own ancestral world? With all its peculiar features, known and unknown, hidden and revealed: no. Not stranger, certainly, than the whole antique structure of Prime World society. Certainly not stranger than the brutal-sophisticated customs of the Hunts. Gentlemen-Huntsmen hating their dragon-prey, Doghunters hating dragons even more than the Gentlemen did and simultaneously hating the Gentlemen and being hated by them; this was strange enough, but this was not all. Nomads hating nobody and trusting nobody, working against the Doghunters who were working against the Gentlemen, but sure that they the Nomads were in all this working only for their own selves and opposing the Doghunters because in doing so they were also opposing the Gentlemen. And the band of thieves whose code of battle was perhaps more brutal than that of the Hunts they ignored and scorned, delighting — it seemed so — equally in the most elaborate forms of poetry and in murderous wrestling matches which ended or which were supposed to end in an elaborate and attenuated form of ritual cannibalism. The urban mobs and the rural sycophants. The dragons roused to fury in the woods and the dragons goaded to frenzy in the pit. The beautiful, involved, involuted, convoluted, contrived and bloody ballet of the dragon hunt, which brought to Prime World the wealth and questing zealousness of men from a score of hundreds of other worlds… though Prime World grew no richer, its aristocrats deepening into moral decay, its poor either flinging themselves in murderous fury against the adamantine wall of their oppressors’ scorn or taking the slow road to sudden death in distant fields or submitting to the yoke in ignorance or in silence… or kissing the bloody hand and fawning at the bloody boot.

Jon-Joras sighed, shook his head. What was behind it all? Was anything? Was there a pattern? There did seem to be hints and shadows and he wanted to know and he had to know if there was more. The ancient saying of ancient Charles Ford or Fort, curious chronicler of curious occurrences in the history of pre-Expansion Prime World, arose in his mind. One measures a circle beginning anywhere…

He got to his feet and went to the controls, took the craft off Hover, placed the chart on its scan-sight alongside the drive-seat, and set himself a course for The Bosky.

Below, far, far below were the waters of the Gulf, the land lying to the south of it, and — beyond the land — partly obscured by a mass of cloud like fleecy smoke, were the yonder waters of the Bay. Behind him lay the Main Sea, before him the Main Continent. The original, or at least the natural contours of the Gulf floor lay revealed to him like some great relief map: shelves and shallows and banks and basins and deeps. And, flashing over and through and across all, like some jagged submarine lightning-bolt, was the deep-scored trench which the Kar-chee had made — one of thousands and of hundreds of thousands such in this one body of water alone. Like an ill-healed scar it showed there, and told its tale of how, floating down upon the planet from their lairs around the Ring Stars and finding a world whose land had been almost scraped bare of metals in making multitudes of ships to fling its children out across the galaxy, the invaders had delved into the seas themselves for metals of their own.

He wondered what ores they had sucked up from the hidden treasures of the sands there, beneath the water. Black sands, they looked to be, and had probably been rich in rare earths and heavy metals such as zircon, rutile, ilmenite and others. He wondered—

The flyer’s speaker broke into voice.

It was a meaningless jumble of phonemes to him. Helplessly, he looked at the decoding cams under the speaker. But unless he knew the combination, he might press on them forever without result. The voice, having made its unintelligible announcement calmly, paused. Then it repeated it a second and then a third time, calmly. Then it waited. It spoke again in its broken syllables, and it seemed to Jon-Joras that there was now a touch of impatience… a fifth time… annoyance… pause… a sixth time… concern…

The voice barked its scrambled syllables at him now, abruptly ceased, abruptly spoke in plain speech, softly, so softly, that Jon-Joras jumped.

“Who has this boat up?” He made no answer. He could hear the man’s troubled breath. “Listen, now — Put the controls onto Receive and lock her so. We’ll guide her back and in. Do you understand? Or you’ll be in trouble. Answer. Answer.

“Answer—”

But Jon-Joras said nothing. And then, softer yet, sickening in its implications, the voice said, slowly, “Oh… you… karching… thief—” and clicked off on the closing fricative.

And the thief looked behind him in dismay, as if he expected pursuit to burst immediately from the nearest cloud. He laughed at himself, but not for long. What should he do now? Put her on All Speed? If he did, he would leave a trail along the sky. Head for clouds and hope to hide the trail? The clouds were too far away, and not where he wanted to go, anyway. He put her into a diagonal descent as fast as she’d go without making marks, and leveled off at about a hundred feet above the water, and locked her so. Then he swiveled the seat around and looked up and waited.

He had not much long to wait.

The pursuers seemed to come bursting out of the fabric of the firmament, their trails thick and heavy and angry. He shot down at forty-five degrees, surged forward against his safety-belt as she hit the surface and watched the sudden surge of frothy water close over the dome and bubble like a dying whale. He put her onto full descent; descend far she could not, of course not, but if it were only hold here where she was as she was — And if the seams and shell proved leak-proof — And if they, the ones so way up high, did not see him — He looked at the chronometer and tried to calculate how long it would take for them to pass over and be gone.

The small craft surged slowly back and forth and slowly up and down. A dull, grinding nausea which seemed to go down to the very marrow of his spine began to afflict him. Finally, he could not go on standing it, tried to surface slowly, shot up like a cork in a spume, fell back and wallowed and rocked again. Hastily, he looked up, but through the moisture running down the dome he could see nothing. And when, finally, he could, he saw only the fading trails of vapor, vanishing into the Gulf.

And now at last he came to the end of that more-than-peninsula and not-quite-subcontinent where it joined the main landmass. He looked at the chart a moment, magnified in the sight-scan, then looked again below. Those rounded hummocks (from above they seemed little more than that) must be the Sixteen Hills; those sudden sparkles of light, the sun reflecting on the Sweet and Bitter Lakes. And there, there, shadowy and sere, was the abrupt descent of the Great Dry Valley. All the landmarks.

Beyond lay The Bosky.

He dropped lower. He looked up and around again. And still no signs of recurrent pursuit. The speaker was, as it had remained, silent. Whom had it been? Who were they? Again, Aëlorix? Or — his mind raced and tumbled about a bit — the Chairman of Drogue? Was there perhaps some force on Prime World of which he had never heard? After all, there was a lot more to it than this part which lay behind him and which was about all that he had ever known. Were there not thriving cities, so it was said, on that great archipelago which formerly formed part of Australia and ringed round that shallow sea once called Lake Eyre? It was possible that the flyers might have come from down there. But bound upon what mystic errands which required them to camouflage their craft, hide in woods, speak in code, and pursue him as though he were himself a rogue dragon—? He could conceive of nothing, in answer. And turned again to chart and to controls.