Jack Vance: The Dragon Masters

Beside the ship the insanity had quieted; the out-worlders huddled quietly beside the hull. There came a sudden mind-shattering explosion; a blankness of yellow and white fire. The ship disintegrated. A great crater marred the valley floor; fragments of metal began to fall among the attacking Banbeck warriors.

Kergan Banbeck stared at the scene of destruction. Slowly, his shoulders sagging, he summoned his people and led them back to their ruined valley. At the rear, marching single-file, tied together with ropes, came the twenty-three grephs, dull-eyed, pliant, already remote from their previous existence. The texture of Destiny was inevitable: the present circumstances could not apply to twenty-three of the Revered. The mechanism must therefore adjust to insure the halcyon progression of events. The twenty-three, hence, were something Other than the Revered: a different order of creature entirely. If this were true, what were they? Asking each other the question in sad croaking undertones, they marched down the cliff into Banbeck Vale.

Across the long Aerlith years the fortunes of Happy Valley and Banbeck Vale fluctuated with the capabilities of the opposing Carcolos and Banbecks. Golden Banbeck, Joaz’s grandfather, was forced to release Happy Valley from clientship when Uttern Carcolo, an accomplished dragon-breeder, produced the first Fiends. Golden Banbeck, in his turn, developed the Juggers, but allowed an uneasy truce to continue. Further years passed; Ilden Banbeck, the son of Golden, a frail ineffectual man, was killed in a fall from a mutinous Spider. With Joaz yet an ailing child, Grode Carcolo decided to try his chances against Banbeck Vale. He failed to reckon with old Hendel Banbeck, grand-uncle to Joaz and Chief Dragon Master. The Happy Valley forces were routed on Starbreak Fell; Grode Carcolo was killed and young Ervis gored by a Murderer. For various reasons, including Hendel’s age and Joaz’s youth, the Banbeck army failed to press to a decisive advantage. Ervis Carcolo, though exhausted by loss of blood and pain, withdrew in some degree of order, and for further years a suspicious truce held between the neighboring valleys.

Joaz matured into a saturnine young man, who, if he excited no enthusiastic affection from his people, at least aroused no violent dislike. He and Ervis Carcolo were united in a mutual contempt. At the mention of Joaz’s study, with its books, scrolls, models and plans, its complicated viewing-system across Banbeck Vale (the optics furnished, it was rumored, by the sacerdotes), Carcolo would throw up his hands in disgust. “Learning? Pah! What avails all this rolling in bygone vomit? Where does it lead? He should have been born a sacerdote; he is the same sort of sour-mouthed cloud-minded weakling!”

An itinerant, one Dae Alvonso, who combined the trades of minstrel, child-buyer, psychiatrist and chiropractor, reported Carcolo’s obloquies to Joaz, who shrugged. “Ervis Carcolo should breed himself to one of his own Juggers,” said Joaz. “He would thereby produce an impregnable creature with the Jugger’s armor and his own unflinching stupidity.”

The remark in due course returned to Ervis Carcolo, and by coincidence, touched him in a particularly sore spot. Secretly he had been attempting an innovation at his brooders: a dragon almost as massive as the Jugger with the savage intelligence and agility of the Blue Horror. But Ervis Carcolo worked with an intuitive and over-optimistic approach, ignoring the advice of Bast Givven, his Chief Dragon Master.

The eggs hatched; a dozen spratlings survived. Ervis Carcolo nurtured them with alternate tenderness and objurgation. Eventually the dragons matured. Carcolo’s hoped for combination of fury and impregnability was realized in four sluggish irritable creatures, with bloated torsos, spindly legs, insatiable appetites. (“As if one can breed a dragon by commanding it: “Exist!’ ” sneered Bast Givven to his helpers, and advised them, “Be wary of the beasts; they are competent only at luring you within reach of their brachs.”)

The time, effort, facilities and provender wasted upon the useless hybrid had weakened Carcolo’s army. Of the fecund Termagants he had no lack; there was a sufficiency of Long-horned Murderers and Striding Monsters, but the heavier and more specialized types, especially Juggers, were far from adequate to his plans. The memory of Happy Valley’s ancient glory haunted his dreams; first he would subdue Banbeck Vale, and often he planned the ceremony whereby he would reduce Joaz Banbeck to the office of apprentice barracks boy.

Ervis Carcolo’s ambitions were complicated by a set of basic difficulties. Happy Valley’s population had doubled, but rather then extending the city by breaching new pinnacles or driving tunnels, Carcolo constructed three new dragon-brooders, a dozen barracks and an enormous training compound. The folk of the valley could choose either to cram the fetid existing tunnels or build ramshackle dwellings along the base of the cliff. Brooders, barracks, training fields; water was diverted from the pond to maintain the brooders; enormous quantities of produce went to feed dragons. The folk of Happy Valley, undernourished, sickly, miserable, shared none of Carcolo’s aspirations, and their lack of enthusiasm infuriated him.

In any event, when the itinerant Dae Alvonso repeated Joaz Banbeck’s recommendation that Ervis Carcolo breed himself to a Jugger, Carcolo seethed with choler. “Bah! What does Joaz Banbeck know about dragon-breeding? I doubt if he understands his own dragon-talk.” He referred to the means by which orders and instructions were transmitted to the dragons: a secret jargon distinctive to every army. To learn an opponent’s dragon-talk was the prime goal of every Dragon Master, for he thereby gained a certain degree of control over his enemies forces. “I am a practical man, worth two of him,” Carcolo went on. “Can he design, nurture, rear and teach dragons? Can he impose discipline, teach ferocity? No. He leaves all this to his dragon masters, while he lolls on a couch eating sweetmeats, campaigning only against the patience of his minstrel-maidens. They say that by astrological divination he predicts the return of the Basics, that he walks with his neck cocked, watching the sky. Is such a man deserving of power and a prosperous life? I say no. Is Ervis Carcolo of Happy Valley such a man? I say yes, and this I will demonstrate.”

Dae Alvonso judiciously held up his hand. “Not so fast. He is more alert than you think. His dragons are in prime condition; he visits them often. And as for the Basics—”

“Do not speak to me of Basics,” stormed Carcolo. “I am no child to be frightened by bugbears!”

Again Dae Alvonso held up his hand. “Listen. I am serious, and you can profit by my news. Joaz Banbeck took me into his study—”

“The famous study, indeed!”

“From a cabinet he brought out a ball of crystal mounted on a black box.”

“Aha!” jeered Carcolo. “A crystal ball!”

Dae Alvonso went on placidly, ignoring the interruption. “I examined this globe, and indeed it seemed to hold all of space; within it floated stars and planets, all the bodies of the cluster. ‘Look well,’ said Joaz Banbeck, ‘you will never see the like of this anywhere. It was built by the olden men and brought to Aerlith when our people first arrived.’

“ ‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘And what is this object?’

“ ‘It is a celestial armamentarium,’ said Joaz. ‘It depicts all the nearby stars, and their positions at any time I choose to specify. Now,’ here he pointed, ‘see this white dot? This is our sun. See this red star? In the old almanacs it is named Coralyne. It swings near us at irregular intervals, for such is the flow of stars in– this cluster. These intervals have always coincided with the attacks of the Basics.’