Avram Davidson: Rogue Dragon

There was a not-quite-mutter, a more-than-whisper, which might have been, “Never mind…”

“Well, but… Where do you come from?”

No. Not drugs. The old man’s mind had simply rusted away. Who could say how long he had been here, a prisoner? A prisoner-at-large, but still a prisoner. He licked his thin lips with a bluish tongue, stirred on his dusty couch and looked about him. “Food,” he said. Sighed. Pointed. There was a small pile of camp-rations, and empty and part-empty containers lay where they had fallen or had been dropped, adding the rotten-sweet tainted smell of garbage to the other ill smells of the room. “Food,” he said again.

Jon-Joras got up and helped himself, paused with a bit of something almost at his mouth. “They bring it here for you?” he asked. And, answering his own question, said, “Yes. They bring you the food and the clothes, too. The other men who come here — the ones who approach in a proper order. Who are they? Who are they? And what is this all ab—”

Now the old man leaped up and scuttled across the dirty floor and sort of crouched before him, looking up and breathing into his face a fetid breath and now his face was distorted with feeling and he grasped Jon-Joras’s arms and he said to him in a whisper like a scream, “Oluc? Oluc? You know Dondon-oluc?”

Remembrance sprang into the young man’s mind and must have instantly been reflected on his face, for the old one tightened his timid grip and made anguished little noises.

“Dondon-oluc and Tiran-lou,” said Jon-Joras. “And the huge old trees—”

“And Lou! And Lou!” the old man cried, in a jerky voice. “Oluc and Lou, ah! And the trees, the trees! The trees…”

He fell into a heap of smeared and smattered clothes that cried and twitched and made dreadful, sobbing noises. Jon-Joras was torn between pity and dismay and hope, and then the old man scuttled backwards away from him and rose to a slouch and stared at him with his awful crumpled face askew and then turned and ran, tottering, out of his nasty room and down the dim, black corridors and whimpered and flapped his wrinkled, dirty hands.

Jon-Joras stared after him. Run after him? No, no, he might get lost, and he had no desire to get lost here in this place where the Kar-chee scent was forever strong, forever fresh. Was the old interpreter off to reveal something to his alien masters? It seemed not likely. Likelier only that he had been all unsettled by having some of the rust and dust of decades fall in scales and flakes from his poor withered mind and memory. The young man put the bit of food into his mouth and looked out the tall slit-window. Outside, downside, between the castle and the woods, the dragon patrolled. Alert, watchful, and with deliberate leisure.

“I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” the old man said. “I’m so afraid.” He spoke in halting, stifled tones, again his face so close to Jon-Joras’s.

“Of what, Old Man?”

“I could be punished. Back there. Ah, back home. Why I came away. Ran. Left me here. Didn’t dare, don’t dare. Afraid,” he wept.

“Confederation has a twenty-five year statute of limitations,” Jon-Joras reminded him. “And Dondon-oluc and Tiran-lou, both, are confederate-worlds. Surely it must be longer than that, you’ve been here?”

Bit by bit and scale by scale by flake, he was trying to do a work of repair. Vast holes had been hopelessly eaten away. The Old Man was either determined to have no name or had simply lost that intensely important part of his persona. Nor would he, or, perhaps, nor could he, describe how or when he had come here or who had taken him here — the who being certainly those still supplying, the those in contact with the Kar-chee. It seemed obvious, though, that whoever they were they had taken advantage of his fugitive status. An interpreter was certainly always needed here, the Kar-chee being incapable of articulate human speech. There had been an interpreter here, of course, when the Old Man had first arrived. “The Poor Woman,” he called her. However awful this life-in-death must be to a man, how much more so must it have been to her! — whoever she was or had been. Poor woman, indeed. For some while at any rate they had been some company for each other, she teaching him to understand the Kar-chee “speech” and to reproduce it; and then she had died.

Longer than twenty-five years that he’d been here? Closer, probably, to fifty!

“Afraid all changed, on Oluc. Oh, terrible—!”

“I was there just two years ago. It didn’t seem to be a place of the sort which changes fast. And the soil was still as thick and rich and the trees were still gigantic.” He reached into his memory for such names as he could recall, trees, rivers, towns… the Old Man made dreadful attempts to smile.

“Afraid of them, still, always. Here.”

“The Kar-chee?”

“Of them, too. But most afraid of this?” And again the dreadful terror-whisper. “Suppose they go? The Kar-chee. And take me with them!”

Enough, indeed, to make the mind of any man, even if young and even if strong and sound, freeze with fear: the Kar-chee departing at long and ancient last for their lairs around the Ring Stars, black and cold and devoid of man and the things which stood between man and madness: this was indeed just cause for fear, to be taken along and to tarry there forever.

Slowly, simply, repetitiously, firmly, Jon-Joras told the Old Man that he was in close contact with the Confederation Delegate on Prime World, that he was also the Private Man of an important outworld ruler. That, whoever had brought him, the Old Man, here and kept him here, it was not Confederation. And therefore it and they by definition were of lesser power and hence unable to withstand the wishes and directives of Confederation… once Confederation knew.

“So the thing that must be done is this: I must get to ConfedBase or at least make contact with Delegate Anse, if I can get away from here in time to meet him when he comes to Peramis. In either case, you see, I must get out of here.”

It was not to be done, it could not be done. The guardian dragons would not allow him to make an escape. They would tear him in pieces. “But,” Jon-Joras protested to the protesting Old Man, “the dragons here obey the Kar-chee, so—”

Now he was to see the other side of the mirror, and its image was at first to be as obscure as its obverse; for the interpreter knew only of the dragons “here” and of none other. “The dragons,” he said, shaking his head, “are the Kar-chee…”

Jon-Joras stared. “But that’s what Hue said!”

“‘Hue’?”

“Old Man, I don’t understand. I saw a dragon. I saw a Kar-chee. They were not the same. How can you say that they are?” Explanations, though, were not forthcoming. Merely he repeated, They were the same. So another question was asked. “What is the set-up between the Kar-chee — and these other men? The other men do something for the Kar-chee, that is, they do something for you. They bring you food and clothing. But what do the Kar-chee do for the other men?”

They kept guard. They let no other men through. They — the Kar-chee who were also dragons — destroyed any others who attempted to enter this territory. Why? Ah. Mmm. The muttered, fragmented pieces of comment scarcely deserved to be called information. But here and there and finally some pieces fell into place. The Old Man was terrified to approach the Kar-chee unsummoned. He had never done so, dared not do so now. Did not even know where, in the maze below his level, it laired. But his will-power, positive or negative, had so long ago fallen into complete desuetude that he could not resist Jon-Joras’s mild but insistent pressures.