Avram Davidson: Rogue Dragon

A shadow seemed to fall over the Master Huntsman’s face. “P’raps so, your High,” he muttered. Young Aëlorix looked at him, suddenly somber. Then someone started a song, and, one by one, everyone joined in.

“Getting there,” someone said. “There’s the island—”

It was hardly great music or good poetry, Jon-Joras thought, wryly. In fact, it was rather dreadful. But it had a swing and a beat to it. The Aëlorix cadet was singing lustily, beating his fists on his naked knees.

The rest of the words were lost to Jon-Joras in the babble of voices as the flyer put down in a clearing in the woods, not a great distance from the river. A small group of men was waiting for them; one of them, a tall stalwart fellow in his thirties, dressed in fine-spun, proved to be the tenant — the others were his sub-tenants. By his manner of speech he might almost have been a Gentleman himself, and, indeed, Jon-Joras had learned from the casual comments of the company, that he was the natural son of one.

The bannermen were in the acts of fastening the colored wefts to the ends of their long poles when the low, rather mournful cry broke upon their ears. All heads went up, turned this way and that. They sniffed the wind like animals. “Not too far off,” Thuemorix muttered. “None too far off…”

Roedeskant quickly got things in order; while he was doing so, Thuemorix repeated the instructions he had given Jon-Joras in the flyer. “Don’t fire until you’re told to,” he concluded, “if you are told to. And aim only at the crux of the X, remember that. If you hit it, you pierce the only nerve-ganglion that counts. Otherwise you can spend the rest of your life shooting into him, if he’d let you — Holy Father! Already!”

He shouted. Lights glinted onto faceted eyes. Thuemorix shouted, Roedeskant flashed his arms, cymbals sounded and shawms blared. The dragon came hurtling out of the woods. The bannermen danced and waved to draw him to the right. He ignored them. Cymbals clashed, arrows flew. He ignored them. Bannermen and archers closed in towards him, running. The dragon, running swiftly, too, ignored them. He reared up upon his hind legs and the archers filled the hide of his belly with their barbs and this time he did not ignore them.

Pivoting upon one great jointed column of a leg, he came pounding down upon the archers. “Oh, blood!” someone cried. “A rogue! A rogue! Rogue dragon!”

The bannermen flew like deer, teasing their bright flags under his very snout. He roared. They downed their poles and fell, hidden, to the grass. The dragon did not stop, came charging on. Screams and turmoil in the grass.

Blood upon the great clawed feet of the dragon.

“Shoot free, shoot free!” Roedeskant shouted. “Any with a sight— shoot free!”

Jon-Joras saw three men raise their guns, fire almost together. The dragon came on, the dragon came on, two more shots, then three, then four, the dragon came on. The archers held their ranks, firing their useless shafts. Not one turned to run. And the dragon, hissing, screaming, flanks and chest and sides and stomach bristling with arrows, bleeding, eyes flashing dreadful beauty, the dragon stooped upon the archers. His talons swept to right and left, his head darted down, came up, jaws grinding, head tossing through the reddened air.

The son of Aëlorix fired his last shaft as the great bull-dragon’s claws swept him off his feet. The boy’s mouth was open, but no song now came from it.

The beast was everywhere, and so, at last, he was in the sights of Jon-Joras’s gun. Aim only at the crux of the X … He remembered Thuemorix’s voice (where was Thuemorix now?) saying the words. But the crux of the X had been obliterated by all the shots poured into it, was a gaping and bloody chasm. Unthinking, automatically, into it he fired his own shot. And fired. And fired. And—

Someone ran into him full-tilt. His last shot before the gun fell went wild. The man, whoever he was, beat upon him with clenched fists, screaming in terror; at last threw him down and ran. Stunned, scarcely able to breath, Jon-Joras felt the concussion of the great beast’s feet, saw out of the corner of his eye, something vast, something bloodstained go sweeping by. There were screams and screams. A voice cried out, shrill, thickened, ceased.

The sky darkened, wheeled, became a whirling concentric circle. Jon-Joras felt himself go sick and cold. And all was black.

Somewhere in between his fainting and his awakening he had heard what he now identified as the sound of the flyer. A sudden tenseness of his muscles warned him just in time to turn his head. He vomited. Then, fearful, lay back for a long moment. But there was nothing to be heard except the drone of flies.

The sun was out and birds called. How many people had come on the impromptu hunt? Jon-Joras, numbed by the sickening sights that lay all about, did not know. Nor could he guess how many might have made their escape in the flyer (if any but the pilot had) or into the woods. No one answered his calls… at first…

Only when he held the bloodied head on his knees did he realized that he had never known the boy’s name. Aëlorix’s boy stared blindly right into the sun. “Tell… tell my mother…” he began.

“I will. I will,” Jon-Joras said. And waited. And waited. But the dead lips spoke no more. Tell his mother! What could he tell her, he wondered, that she had not already guessed and feared!

Numbly following the custom of his own people, he laid a clot of earth on each closed eye, and straightened the arms at full length, folding the hands together in a loose clasp. “ ‘Ended is this scene and act,’ ” he said. “ ‘May the curtain rise upon a fairer one. …’” He could not remember the rest of it.

When you have no idea in which direction anything is, it makes as much sense to go in one direction as another. The river and the Lie village were not too far away, but he had no notion where. The sensible thing was obviously to wait right where he was until help came. But this was the one thing he could not do — not at that field of death, over which the dark birds had already begun to circle.

He made a circle of his own around the clearing, and took the first path he found. The afternoon was late indeed before he dared admit that, wherever the path led, it did not lead to the Lie village. And then he heard the dogs. It should not have come to him as the heart-swelling surprise it did. Where there were Doghunters, there were bound to be dogs. Besides, had he not seen their severed heads? Recalling the mottled teeth in the bloody muzzle, he broke into an awkward, stumbling run.

Someone was there; he saw the glimmer of cloth off to one side on the slope. Instantly upon his outcry, it vanished, and he left the path to follow, leaping over fallen trees and little rivulets running through the soft, mossy earth. Someone was there ahead of him in the darkening daylight…