Алан Дин Фостер - Mad Amos Malone

Near a fork of the Laramie River he paused and made camp, choosing an open meadow across which the river ran free and fast. To the west the crests of the mountains already slept beneath the first heavy blanket of snow.

“Well, Worthless, I guess this is as good a spot as any. Might as well get on with it. Oughta be an interesting business, unless I’ve figured it all wrong. In that case, you hie yourself off somewhere and have a good time. These mountains are full of herds. Find yourself some fine mares and settle down. Bet you wouldn’t be all that sad to see me go, would you?”

The horse let out a noncommittal whinny, squinted at him out of his bad eye, and wandered off in search of a nice mud wallow to roll in.

Mad Amos hunted until he found a willow tree of just the right age. He cut off a green branch, shaped it, and trimmed off the leaves and sproutings. Then he sharpened the tip with his bowie, fired it in charcoal, and used the white-hot, smoking point to etch some strange symbols in the earth around his kit. Some of the symbols were Chinese ideographs, some were Tibetan, and a few were not drawn from the lexicon of man.

Next he rummaged around in his battered old saddlebags, which some folk whispered held things it were best not to talk about. Out came an owl’s head, a bottle of blue goo, several preserved dead scorpions, three eagle feathers bound together with Zuni fetishes, and similar exotica. He reached in a little farther and withdrew a shiny metal bar. It was five pounds of enriched tumbaga, a gold alloy made by the Quimbaya Indians of the southern continent, composed of roughly sixty-five percent gold, twenty percent copper, and the rest silver. This he set carefully down in the center of the inscribed symbols.

Lastly he pulled the rifle from its fringed and painted holster. The holster had been fashioned by one of Sacajawea’s daughters. Good gal, that Sacajawea, he mused. Someday when they were both ruminating in the Happy Hunting Ground, he hoped to meet her again.

The rifle had an eight-sided barrel, a black walnut stock, and a breech large enough for a frightened cottontail to hide inside. It was a Sharps buffalo rifle, fifty-caliber, with a sliding leaf sight adjustable to eleven hundred yards on the back. It fired a two-and-a-half-inch-long cartridge loaded with a hundred grains of black powder and could drop a full-grown bull buffalo in its tracks at six hundred yards. The bandoliers draped across Mad Amos’s chest held oversized three-and-a-quarter-inch shells packed with 170 grains of black powder.

The Sharps was a single-shot. But then, if you could fire it proper without busting your shoulder, you only needed a single shot. To Mad Amos’s way of thinking, such built-in caution just naturally led to a man improving his marksmanship.

He loaded it with more care than usual this time, paying special attention to the cartridge itself, which he carefully chose from the assortment arrayed on his chest.

Then he settled down to wait.

The moon was setting and the sky had been temporarily swept clean of most clouds when he heard the wings coming toward him out of the west, out of the mountaintops. Soon he was able to see the source of the faint whistling, a streamlined shape dancing down fast out of the heavens, its long tail switching briskly from side to side as it sniffed out the location of the gold.

It landed between the river and the camp and strode toward the lonely man on feet clad in scales of crimson. Its neck was bright blue, its body mostly yellow and gold, its wings and face striped like the contents of a big jar stuffed with assorted candies. Moonlight marched across scimitarlike teeth, and its heritage burned back of its great eyes. “Whoa up there!” Mad Amos called out sharply in the dragon tongue, which is like no other (and which is hard to speak because it hurts the back of the throat).

The dragon halted, eyes blazing down at the human, who had one foot resting possessively on the golden bar. Its tail twitched, flattening the meadow grass and foxgloves, and the tendrils bordering its skull and jaws twisted like snakes with a peculiar life of their own. Its belly ached for the cool touch of yellow metal; its blood burned for the precious golden substance that purified and helped keep it alive.

“Oho!” it replied in its rasping voice. “A human who talks the mother tongue. Admirable is your learning, man, but it will not save you your gold. Give it here to me.” It leaned forward hungrily, the smell of brimstone seeping from its garishly hued lips and parted mouth.

“I think not, Brightbodyblackheart. It ain’t that I resent you the gold. Everybody’s got to eat. But you scared the wits out of some good people hereabouts and killed a couple of others. And I think you’re liable to kill some more afore you’re sated, if your appetite’s as big as your belly and your desire as sharp as your teeth. I’m not fool enough to think you’ll be satisfied just with this here chunk.” He nudged the bar with his foot, causing the hungry dragon to salivate smoke.

“You are right, man. My hunger is as deep as the abyssal ocean where I may not go, as vast as the sky which I make my own, and as substantial as my anger when I am denied. Give me your gold! Give it over to me now and I will spare you for your learning, for though gluttonous, I am not wasteful. Refuse me and I will eat you, too, for a dragon cannot live by gold alone.”

Casually, Mad Amos shifted the rifle lying across his knees. “Now, this here’s a Sharps rifle, Deathwing. I’m sure you ain’t too familiar with it. There ain’t the like of it where you come from, and there never will be, so I’ll explain it to you. There ain’t no more powerful rifle in this world or the other. I’m going to give you one chance to get back to where you come from, hungry but intact.” He smiled thinly, humorlessly. “See, I ain’t wasteful, neither. You git your scaly hide out of this part of the real world right now or by Nebuchadnezzar’s nightshade, I’m oath-bound to put a bullet in you.”

The dragon roared with amusement. Its horrible laughter cascaded off the walls of the canyon through which the Laramie runs. It trickled down the slopes and echoed through caves where hibernating animals stirred uneasily in their long sleep.

“A last gesture, last words! I claim forfeit, man, for you are not amusing! Gold and life must you surrender to me now, for I have not the patience to play with you longer. My belly throbs in expectation, and in my heart there is no shred of sympathy or understanding for you. I will take your gold now, man, and your life in a moment.” A great clawed foot reached out to scratch contemptuously at the symbols so patiently etched in the soil. “Think you that these will stop me? You do not come near knowing the right ways or words, or the words you would have uttered by now.” It took another step forward. Fire began to flame around its jaws. “Your puny steel and powder cannot harm me, worm-that-walks-upright. Fire if you wish. The insect chirps loudest just before it is squashed!”

“Remember, now, you asked for this.” Quickly, Mad Amos raised the long octagonal barrel and squeezed the trigger.

There was a crash, then a longer, reverberating roar, the thunderous double boom that only a Sharps can produce. It almost matched the dragon’s laughter.

The shot struck Brightbodyblackheart square in the chest. The monster looked down at the already healing wound, sneered, and took another step forward. Its jaws parted farther as it prepared to snap up gold and man in a single bite.

It stopped, confused. Something was happening inside it. Its eyes began to roll. Then it let out an earthshaking roar so violent that the wind of it knocked Mad Amos back off his feet. Fortunately, there was no fire in that massive exhalation.