Dragonslayer: A Novel (18 page)

Valerian had descended into the hall as she spoke, and people had already begun to crowd around her and Simon, to touch their arms, to take their hands. The big man could not control himself, and several times he had to turn away to dry his tears with a sleeve. As for Valerian, she met everyone's gaze directly, as she had always forced herself to do, facing down every suspicion and doubt before it was fully formed. Soon even the fathers of lost daughters were coming forward, even Greil, and little by little the festive mood returned. The musicians struck up the dance again. Several of the bolder young men asked Valerian to join them, but she looked so steadily at Galen that at last he could no longer ignore the invitation. "I can't dance," she whispered, as they joined the other circling couples on the floor.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "I can't either."

They danced.
This is what it is like,
Galen thought,
to be among friends.
And then:
This is how a hero feels!
But no sooner did he think that than he gasped in pain, doubled over, for a sudden heat from the amulet struck like a bee sting at his chest. He made excuses to Valerian. "My toe. Stubbed my toe on the loose board." After that he thought simpler and more modest thoughts.
I am a man. This is what it is like to be a man, to be alive.

They danced into the night, until at last, when the moon had risen to its height above the Granary, they rested and turned their attention to the food on the great tables. Gradually they dispersed around the hall in smaller groups—men talking buoyantly, women laughing, pairs of lovers and shrieking flocks of children chasing each other in games of hide-and-seek. For the moment, for these people, Swanscombe was the world, and it was a world utterly safe.

When all had eaten, and when the mugs and flagons were being filled again, the musicians struck up a proud, sad rhythm which was not at all the rhythm of the dance. The music delved back through time itself, sinuous, querulous, searching, suggestive, circling upon itself so that the tail of the last movement was absorbed in the first notes of the one beginning. Conversation ceased. Most of those listening had never heard such music, at once frightening and entrancing, but the older people recognized it as the music of the Old Lays, the endless songs in which the history of the people was preserved, to be examined, and re-examined, and constantly elaborated and enriched. Then, into the open center of the Granary stepped the bard Benoc, the oldest of the men in Swanscombe and blind since birth, charmed for that reason, and gifted with an undistractable mind that had turned utterly to memory. Through all the vicissitudes of the years, through blight, drought, skirmishes, and upheaval, Benoc had endured, listening and recording, accumulating, sifting the essential from the inconsequential, shaping and reshaping, so that each time he sang the Lays they were the same as they had always been, yet different, more sinuous and elaborate, like the intricate interwoven designs on Valerian's silver brooches. Delighted, Valerian touched Galen's arm. Throughout her childhood she had loved Benoc's songs and stories more than anything else. She and her friends had spent hours listening to him, this beatific and changeless old man, roaming in a region of memory and imagination where the differences of men and women did not matter, and where she did not have to pretend.

Now in the hush, Benoc struck a soft chord on his lute, a chord that was echoed by the musicians before their melody receded behind Benoc's song. He sang first, as was the custom, of the descent of the legendary Saxon heroes. He sang of Saebehrt, Ethel-bert, Hengist, and Witta. He sang of Cerdic, Baeldaeg, and Angen-wit. He described their feats, their heroic strength in battle against Romans, Britons, and unnatural beasts. His voice was perfectly pitched and limpid, not at all the voice of an old man, but rather of someone eternally young and immortal. He sang of the deeds of Beowulf, and of that hero's great fight with the monster Grendel, and of his encounter with Grendel's mother, and finally of his immolation by the dragon. He told them of the arrival of Vermithrax at Swanscombe, and somehow in a magical feat of taletelling, he swept all the Givings into one event, and all the women who had sacrificed their lives into one splendid heroine, immortalized; and in the telling he included too the death of Vermithrax, but obliquely, strangely, as one would speak of something imminent rather than realized; and then to Galen's embarrassment he mentioned his name, turning toward him despite his sightlessness, and Galen shook his head and said, "No, no, not Galen—
Ulrich!"
as if it were important that a record be put straight. But no one heard, and it did not seem to matter, for the blind old man's smile and the fluid structure of his tale included all of that, all 'of Galen's concern and knowledge, and more, infinitely more, so that the boy at once felt assured again, ennobled by truths he had not perceived.

Benoc's song entered different times then and grew elliptical and circular, so that the listeners were now sure that they knew the subject, now equally sure that they did not. It seemed sometimes to be the stuff of myth and sometimes the ephemera of prediction, and then both at once. It suggested that the evolution of all the world traced a huge spiral, repeating again and again the same events, yet each time subtly different, even as identical twins grow apart with time and bear the marks of separate experience. Such was the spiraling timelessness that underlay Benoc's song, although it seemed to deal with the eternal themes of love and honor, of duty and compassion, and of heroism.

The song did not take long—perhaps as long as a lounging man would take to drain his flagon—but magically it encompassed all of life in the listeners' imaginations, all of existence. So rapt by it were they that when Benoc had ceased to sing the images and wonder continued on, and they all participated in that magic and could not have said where the poet left off and they themselves continued.

So it was that at the end of this perfect evening, far, far away from the outside world and all its cares, they were gradually brought back to a different rhythm, a rhythm of distant hoofbeats. One by one they heard the hooves, although some, those entranced the deepest, did not hear them until they sounded on the cobbles immediately outside the Granary and were combined with the blowing of winded horses and the creak of saddlery as riders dismounted. Galen was one of the last to return. He was aware of an intake of breath around him and he turned dreamily to see

Tyrian, his hands on his hips, blocking the doorway. Behind him, the despicable Jerbul lurked, grinning, fondling his dagger.

"Celebrants," Tyrian sneered. "Celebrating a young hero, are we?" His arm raised and he was pointing at Galen. "You were warned! You disobeyed! You ignored that warning!"

"I have slain the dragon," Galen answered.

"Perhaps," Tyrian said. "We shall see. In any case—" And here he stabbed a warning finger at Galen, "—do not leave Urland!"

CHAPTER EIGHT

Horgenthorme

Despite Tyrian's warning
, the weeks that followed were the happiest Galen had ever known. He never thought of leaving Swanscombe. For the first time in his life, he felt at hpme. He accepted Simon's invitation to move into Simonburgh and to learn the working of silver and gold, a craft that seemed to Galen almost as splendid as sorcery. He helped with all the summer labor of the village—the sowing and planting, the cultivation and the reaping, the building of new houses, and the tending of cattle and sheep on the slopes. He took his place as a man that summer among the Swanscombe villagers, and when he and Valerian became lovers that too was accepted as naturally as sunrise or the turning of the leaves in fall. To mark the occasion, Simon crafted him a bold and magnificent silver ring.

There were, of course, some wounds that did not heal and would never heal. When Galen and Valerian went to see Melissa's parents—something which she felt she had to do—they found Melissa's mother hopelessly crazed, talking brightly to and about her daughter as if the girl were sitting with them; but when Valerian gave her the ring that she had found in the Blight on the day of their return, reality struck the woman like a lash. For a moment she sat quietly holding the ring in the palm of her hand, and then she stood up and flung it at Valerian, and spat, and uttered such foul abuse that Melissa's father came shuffling from his workshop to restrain her. "Go, please," he said.

Nor was this incident the only cloud on Galen's horizon that summer. He was aware of Tyrian's surveillance. Although he heard nothing further from either the centurion or the king, several times when he looked up from the task in hand he saw a dark horseman—a member of Tyrian's troop—on the horizon or at the edge of the forest, and he knew that the watch was being kept both on himself and on the brooding lair of Vermithrax. One day, he and Valerian walked west from Swanscombe. They intended to picnic in the hills, but they grew so absorbed in their conversation that before they realized it they had passed the Blight, descended the long slope into the valley of the Varn, entered the woods oblivious to the clucking warnings of Gringe, and emerged on the bank of the River Varn itself. Through the shallows a large, gray heron was stalking a frog sunning on a log. Something about that heron, some familiar oddity in the way it held its neck, caught Galen's attention. But it was not the bird which jolted both him and Valerian back to reality. A horseman was coming across the ford toward them. This was no ordinary traveler, of which there had been several through Urland that summer; this was one of Tyrian's cavalrymen and he was advancing at a brisk trot, lance lowered, horse's hooves splashing in the sun. Furthermore, there were others farther upstream, alerted by their colleague's sudden activity. "All right!" Galen had shouted. "We're going back! It was a mistake! We're going back!" And they retreated up the road, shaken by the incident.

On the whole, however, the summer passed blissfully, and Galen, who had no doubts that the dragon was dead, was preparing to spend at least the immediate future in this agreeable village and this pleasant land.

Then, one night late in August, when thunder rumbled in the distance, Simon suddenly raised his hand for silence. They had been working and talking together in the forge, and at Simon's signal Galen stopped midsentence, for he heard what Simon had heard—the faint but unmistakable fall of horses' hooves on Swanscombe bridge. It was too late for peaceful travelers to be on the road; it could only have been one of Tyrian's patrols. Unbreath-ing, they listened while the hoofbeats approached and stopped outside the doorway of the forge. Again there were guttural chucklings; again the saddlery creaked ominously; again a black-clad figure darkened the doorway—Tyrian himself. "You. Galen. Come with me. Casiodorus wants you."

"But. . ."

"Now!" said Tyrian. He was watching Simon.

Galen stood up. "I'll get my pack."

"As you are! Now."

"I'm going with him," Valerian said moving forward. "I'm going, too."

Tyrian blocked the doorway, smiling. "When we want you," he said, stabbing a finger at her, "we'll come for you!"

Then, as quickly as they had come, the horsemen had gone, and Galen with them, their hoofbeats again echoing distantly on Swanscombe bridge and away on the road to Morgenthorme.

Grimly, Simon reached out and took his shocked daughter into his arms.

His Majesty Casiodorus, King and Lord Protector of Urland, Dragon Tamer and Appeaser of Spirits, was not an imposing figure. He was pale and scrawny. He had been afflicted since childhood with an asthmatic condition which caused him to breathe through his mouth, lending him an unfortunate and perpetually simpleminded expression. His eyes, too, were somewhat rheumy, and he had developed the stoop of very tall men who are constantly bending to hear. He was over six and a half feet, a height sufficient to silence supplicants, or to withdraw from tedious conversations simply by straightening his back and staring through a window of Morgenthorme across the moors to the distant hills. He rarely did this, however; unlike Tyrian, he was at heart a kindly man. He loved small dogs and roses and he loved his distracted daughter, Elspeth, with a passionate protectiveness. Sometimes, wandering in his garden, or stroking a puppy, or watching Elspeth's childlike delight in one of her white animals, a surge of infantile joy would pass through Casiodorus so intense that he would straighten, suddenly grave, and say aloud, "I should never have been a king."

Indeed, he never should have been. Saxon kingship owed little to succession, much to ability and presence; and had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances prevailing in Urland at the time of his father's death, he never would have inherited the throne. He knew that fact well and would smile ironically, recalling it. But, of course, he meant something more human by the comment; he meant that there was in him a terrible softness incompatible with kingship. That very quality, which in other men might have been endearing, in a king was a weakness. Publicly, of course, he had sealed it over—or believed that he had. He had trained himself to make decisions quickly and to stand by them once made, right or wrong. He had also trained himself in the Steady Gaze, fixing courtiers and petitioners alike with a stare that was in stark contrast to the slack mouth beneath it. In many cases, this contrast in itself passed for intelligence or perspicuity. The most formidable protective device he had perfected, however, was his reliance on logic and directness.

He had always loved straight lines. The road leading to Mor-genthorme was straight for the last half mile, the castle itself was a neat rectangle, and the corridors and staircases inside were as angular as possible. There were no turrets, no spiral staircases. The furniture, too, was rectangular and set squarely in its various rooms, each piece carefully aligned with the others.