Avram Davidson: Rogue Dragon

“But who are they?”

“Doghunters… Up here, guest — these steps.” They began upon a long covered wooden walkway, curving gently upward and to the right, gardened courtyards on either side and potted plants and caged birds lining the rail below and above on the walk itself. The younger man admired the neatness and the taste of the scene, but tried to fit the spoken phrase into his recollection of his readings. Doghunters…

Suddenly the key fitted and the wards turned. “Free farmers!” he exclaimed.

He saw his host’s mouth give a slight twist. “Fancy name,” he said. “Doghunters. Useful in their way. But — dirty fellows.” Somewhere ahead music sounded, as different from the elaborate orchestrations of his home world as it was from the crude — though, in its setting, appropriate — harshness of the hunt musics. The covered walk continued to curve on ahead, but the two took a broad branch to the left. The clean planking here was covered with soft reed mats on which designs had been traced in red.

The same motifs were extended and elaborated on the oiled-paper windows of the high screen door whose panels parted silently to admit them; and the melody grew louder. Jon-Joras found himself in a place so strange to him that he stopped short and drew in his breath. It was more a hall than a room, but it contained things in it never seen by him in any hall before. Built around part of a hillside, seemingly, it had a little waterfall plashing and purling in one corner of it; and the tiny stream moved in its channel across the floor to a pool in the center. Bright colored fish swam and darted there. In another section a garden of stepped-back semicircular shelves rose around and retreated from a tall, cylindrical aviary, a rainbow of birds which provided their own background to the music.

The source of this was in a floor of light from a windowed cupola: a dark-skinned woman in a full, embroidered robe. She sat, unseeing, at her instrument, from which came the flow of tinkling sounds, her ringed fingers moving across the keys with stiff but beautiful precision. Suddenly she saw or heard, perhaps felt, them. The music ceased. Jon-Joras might not have been there, for all the notice she took.

“Ae, what news?” she cried.

“The usual,” he said, shrugging. “A hunt — an outworlder. Usual kill. Too quick, though—”

Lustrous eyes, beautiful tan face expressed something between anger and distress. “I don’t mean that! Don’t dissemble — what news?”

He hesitated; she saw it; he saw that she saw it. “You make too much of trifles, ma’am—”

“Ae!”

“Nothing but a bull-drag. Southward in Belroze Woods. His epithalamion. I didn’t seem to recognize his cry. That’s all.”

An expression which was not relief, quite, but which yet relaxed the look of tense concern, passed across her lovely face. It did not linger long. Her long fingers left the instrument, came together before her throat, and clasped.

“I do not like it,” she said, almost as if to herself. “No. No. No… I do not like it…”

Although the 3D scoping equipment here on Prime World was as good as anywhere in the multi-world Confederation (“the lands of the Starry Compact,” as Por-Paulo had called it in a speech — inwardly wincing, so he confided in Jon-Joras, at the purple phrase), the local economy did not run to any viewing system: the Hunt scenes could be shown off-world, not there. Communications were non-visual. Some faint reflection that 2D was surely at least possible had engaged Jon-Joras’s mind, but not for long. Prime World was, as far as the Hunt Company was concerned, chiefly a game preserve; had been little more for centuries. The hand of the Confederation rested lightly, very lightly here. What was good enough for the Hunt Company in this now remote and passed-by globe seemed good enough for the Confederation.

The face of the communicator was nothing but an instrument board, and Jetro Yi, when he called in as directed next morning, was nothing but a voice.

“I’m lining up one of the best Hunters for your principal, P.M.,” he said, in his usual important tones. “A Gentleman by the name of Thuemorix. One of the best—”

“That’s good, Company.”

“He’s promised to draw us a prime bull. A five.”

“How’s that?”

“A five. Dragons are at prime at five years. After that, well, they begin to go downhill. And before that, too green. I mean, huh-huh, literally as well as figuratively, huh-huh. How would it look for your king to come back with a skin that anyone who knows anything, well, they could at one glance just tell by the color that he hadn’t had a first-class hunt? Wouldn’t look good at all. You take some of these pot-bellied parvenus, come here in a hurry, all they want is the prestige, well, huh-huh, if they draw a hen-dragon or an old crone, who’s going to know the difference, the circles they move in; skin could be pea-green or rusty-black. But not for your principal, no sir, nothing to worry about.”

And he pumbled on and on. There was nothing immediately requiring Jon-Joras’s attention. In a few days he expected to have a lodge lined up for him to look at, to be let with staff while the owners went south on a long visit. “But nothing immediate. So just enjoy your stay with His High Nascence.”

“All right, Company.”

“And I’ll report tomorrow morning.”

“All right, Company.” He flicked off before Jetro Yi could give a resume of all the face-to-face conversations he had had with Jetro Yi. When you had heard him once you had heard him forevermore — unless you had a boundless appetite for the commerce of the hunt.

Leaving the communicator, he strolled at ease through the charming, rambling house out towards the by-buildings in which he knew he would find his host inspecting the livestock. Aëlorix was in the deer-sheds, greeted him with a wave of his hand towards a fat gray doe that was being washed around the udders prior to milking.

“Beauty, isn’t she? Won two prizes.”

“I must accept that judgment, sir. We have none like this out my way, on M.M. beta.”

“No, I suppose not… This your king’s first hunt?”

Jon-Joras tentatively stroked the doe’s soft muzzle. It was Por-Paulo’s first dragon hunt, yes. (“That’s the only kind that counts,” his host said firmly, with the self-contained assurance of an untraveled provincial.) Jon-Joras described Por-Paulo’s three quests for sundi in the swamps of Nor, before his first election — the absolute protective coloration of the sundi — how (so the king had described it) it seems as if a triangular piece of swamp suddenly hurtles through the air. “It’s not a game for the slow, sir. Instant reflexes, or death.”

“Mmm…”

“He’s gone five or six times for dire-falcons, too, out of the aeries of Gare. A thousand, two thousand feet up, if you miss—”

“Mmm…” Insecurely mounted on one winged creature and aiming at another, fiercer one, as it swoops and spins and dives, hooked beak and razor talons. But all Aëlorix said was, “Mmmm… I don’t deny there seems to be an element of danger. But you can get that, you know, from all I hear (oh, wouldn’t go myself if you paid me), just trying to cross a road in one of the populous planets. No. A hunt, you see—”

They left the deer-shed, host courteously leading guest by the wrist, and crossed a wide place of beaten earth. “—is not a mere matter of danger. Not a dragon hunt, at any rate. It’s a matter of ritual, art, music, skill, color, tradition. There’s more to it than just exposing yourself to a chunk of mud with teeth in it. And this is an acknowledged fact. Ask any Company man, ‘What’s your most popular, most sought-after, most expensive hunt?’ One answer. ‘Dragon.’ It was true, this last. Jon-Joras said nothing.