Everran's Bane (6 page)

Flopping into the chair, Gerrar mopped at his brow, and presently assembled a reply.

“Last word was this morning. Coed Wrock . Saw the neighbor's steading burn and ran for their lives. Coed Wrock—” his face knotted with the struggle to recall knowledge basic as his name. “Coed Wrock is... just across the Kelf.”

“Good.” Astounded, I saw Beryx was smiling again: a blade-like smile worlds away from mirth. As Gerrar's jaw dropped, he put a hand on the plump shoulder. “Now forget the dragon too. Just think of someone smart enough to take the king's authority and picket three hundred horses. And then tell me his name.”

It proved to be the garrison lieutenant. He had no fresh news, but once extricated and undistracted he collared some farmers and fairly ran them out to the task. As we rode up to our beleaguered column, Beryx gave a little sigh, and there was a kind of gaiety in his eyes.

“Right, lads!” he called, shouldering past a wheelbarrow load of fowls and two collided ox-carts. “You can get dressed. We're off!”

* * * * *

The men marched in a mood wild as Beryx's. As they forged through the refugees still clogging our track there were extravagant jests at escape from the horses, extravagant grumbles at the bull-hide armor's weight, extravagant boasts of the dragon's doom. Beryx made them soak each other in the Kelf's shallow fords, which doubled the complaints. Then he formed them in a hollow square with archers and banner in the midst, and after that, to me, the jests rang jarringly false. For as he called the Advance, I saw the high tawny skyline of Astarien's Slief was limned not against gray rain clouds, but on a bleak blue sky rimed with smoke.

I reassessed the men around me. They moved solidly, ponderously, thick bone and muscle cased in each sodden carapace, the sarissas swinging with the even ripple of a long distance march, yet now I could read the tension in each familiar face. Perhaps, I thought, the joking was a thing they could not help.

Beryx alone had retained his horse. Presently he called back, “Harran! Why don't you help these clumpers along?”

So it was the rhythm of an old marching song, older perhaps than Berrian, which swung us up the rutted track to the water-blackened, dust-yellow rock divide that names Coed Wrock. Watershed Farm. And it was upon that rhythm that we topped the crest, and a wide bowl of devastation opened beneath us about two fountains of strong black smoke.

Beryx called the Halt. Inyx went forward to his horse. I heard scraps of talk. “New smoke”... “must be here”... “Where is it, then?”

The valley was wide, strewn with outcrops of house-sized granite boulders, scattered with thick stands of whippy upland norgal and writhen black ensal trees among acres and acres of scorched, smoldering grass. In all that desolation only the smoke and a black cloud of morvallin moved.

Inyx was still talking. Beryx shrugged. Inyx's voice rose. “. . . daft, I tell you—dismount them and not yourself! For the Lords' love—” Beryx's jerk of the chin superseded words.

He came riding back, calm now, but with a mad, dancing brightness in his eye. “Ready, lads?” Perfect confidence in the smile. “Harper, take cover here. You can't ‘appraise the men of valor' with their sarissa butts knocking you in the teeth.”

I opened my mouth, but he had already looked away. It was a command, not open to dispute.

The ranks parted for me. Iphas gave me a tight grin. Thrim said, “Keep t'head down, harper.” Asc gripped my arm and said nothing at all.

The Advance was passed. The square began to move. I sat up on a rock and watched, defiant, desolate. They reached the burnt ground. Black ash puffed up, I caught the muffled thump of boots, a cough, squeak of wet hide, clink of belts. Then, high, clear, merrily taunting, the trumpet sounded. Not a war-call. Beryx had offered the ultimate impudence: it was the hunter's View Halloo.

I waited, feeling my stomach squirm. The square was well distant now, on an open slope down to the gullies that veined the valley center, swaying and twisting as they held rank over the broken ground. Glaring round, I thought, almost desperately, Damn you, come out.

The ridge-top beyond me moved. Ten or twelve boulders shifted like a waking snake. A knoll rippled, surged, became a crest of tree-length spines, a spur toppled into a fore-arm, a shoulder, a foot the size of a horse's trunk, with nails and spurs longer than scythes. Then the whole rock line beyond left the ground and swung slowly, drowsily, sideways in midair. Hawge had lifted its head.

Out in the valley came the small urgent ring of commands. The square stopped, shifting as the ranks faced outward on each side. The front line knelt, and the men behind them planted sarissa butts in the ground. It was a hedgehog, crouched for offensive defense.

Languidly, Hawge lumbered afoot. Its back was to me, so I saw the scorpion sting on the dragging tail. The legs sprang lizard-like up from below the trunk and angled down again to the foot, which moved clumsily, hampered by its frightful claws, but the thighs were huge as trees. The back curved up under its crest of spines, as yet lying half erect, dipped to the serpentine neck, and rose again to the head. I still see that in my dreams.

I suppose it most resembled a gigantic earless, hairless horse. The nostrils were monstrously oversized, and the orbital bones exaggerated so the eyes bulged out far beyond the head: pupilless eyes, multi-facetted, twirling like a fly's. What struck me hardest was their color. Because like Beryx's, they were green.

It took a step, and the membranous wings rattled on its sides. It was mailed, as the lore says, iridescent black, gold, silver when it moved, glinting on its lean greyhound flanks. The tail twitched. Then, slothfully, with a volcano's insolence, it yawned.

The jaws seemed to open forever, clean back to the eyes, the lower one pointed and reptilian, both snagged with curving white fangs, clear against black stains on the serrated canine lips, the immense red tongue, and the gullet like a well. It sighed: a forge-like roar. A small jet of fire shot from its nostrils, and I caught the opened-grave stench of its breath.

It seemed half-minded to lie down again, for the head swayed, low to the ground. The eyes revolved torpidly, a green corpse-light against the leathery skull. Then the trumpet rang again.

Hawge sighed in answer, unfurled its wings, black leather mainsails, and leapt up into the air.

The image of those massive flanks and shoulders' wave-like ripple blinded me. I next saw it circling the valley, flying with a vulture's labored indolence, twirling its eyes to study the men below.

Whatever Beryx said, the words were inaudible. The huge burst of laughter which followed them was clear enough, and enough, it seemed, to pierce a dragon's hide. Hawge dropped from its patrol and angled in at them, the mighty wings rowing lazily, the head almost skimming the ground.

Nor did I know Beryx's battle plan. I merely saw the sarissas on that side swing apart, heard Inyx's whiplash, “Fire!” and Beryx yelling above him, “Take its eyes!”

A flight of arrows flashed up and over with a second flight so close that it looked continuous. They were the Tiriann clothyard shafts that can pierce a shield and go on to kill an armored man, and for all its armed and armored might Hawge lifted over the square like a huge black morval that has mistaken its prey. A yell of, “Everran!” followed it from three hundred throats.

The dragon snorted in reply. Fire shot out ahead and wreathed back along it sides. It flicked over on a wing, turned in its length with a breath-stopping agility, and this time there was no indolence in its flight.

Inyx bellowed again. The sarissa points swung out and down as they do for the charge, and the ranks braced their shoulders for the shock.

Hawge leveled out with tail brushing the ground. Just beyond spear length it reared up as a fighting cock does to use its spurs, beat the huge wings once to give the blow full impulse, and flung itself upon the spears.

Sarissas broke like sticks, men tumbled head over heels, the square side collapsed like a broken dam. But with a scream of pain and wrath that nearly burst my eardrums, Hawge hurtled past the banner and sought refuge in the higher air.

I vaguely recall them pulling each other upright, grabbing for weapons, laughing as they scrambled back into line amid Inyx's brazen roars. I was myself leaping up and down in a manner most unbardlike, yelling taunts to the dragon that now circled fast and furiously, spouting fire as it stoked its rage. Great gouts of flame hung like lurid puffballs in the sky. Beryx was yelling as ferociously as Hawge had, while his horse plunged and gyrated, utterly terrified.

The square had barely reformed when Hawge banked, folded its wings, and catapulted into a dive. It plummeted down like a monstrous misshapen falcon stooping straight on the square's center and so fast I thought it would break its own neck as well as theirs.

The sarissas shot up. I looked to see them all crushed bodily, no steel sting could repulse such a charge. Then the wings backed with a slam like thunder; the dragon braked impossibly and unleashed a spout of fire just above their heads.

The square vanished in foul black smoke, the dragon roared like a furnace and shot by just above it, the tall green banner toppled, I heard shouts, screams, Inyx and Beryx roaring through the din. The dragon doubled up, leant in on a wing, and spouted again.

The uproar crescendoed. Easily now, the dragon lifted away.

The smoke convulsed and battered itself. Then, from its depths emerged, not scattered, broken fugitives, but a bank of haphazardly pointing spears.

Slowly the square coalesced beneath. The men staggered, some supporting others, coughed, choked, swiped at their eyes. Their bull-hide armor steamed like kettles and they beat their arms frantically to and fro. The sarissa ranks were ragged, the lines worse than doglegs: but they were intact. Even as I looked, a sooty green rag jerked upward in their midst.

Hawge's scream could have pulverized rocks. The square dressed ranks with frantic fumbling haste while the dragon whipped round and round overhead, re-stoking its fire. Beryx wrestled his maddened horse. Inyx was still roaring, hoarse with smoke. As the dragon turned over into its next dive, the sarissas opened and a flight of arrows met it high above fire-range.

Hawge swerved in mid-plummet, screamed with rage, and tore up into the higher air.

The square swayed as men propped themselves on others' shoulders. Some were running back into the smoke, retrieving sarissas, tearing home as the dragon dropped once more.

This time the arrows did not deter it. Three times it scourged them with flame, and three times the square sustained it, emerging disordered and distressed but unbroken beyond the smoke. But the sarissas were thinner, broken or burnt, and as the square moved, many wounded or disarmed men were helped along in its midst. I was hoarse with futile shouting, and my stomach had grown cold. How long before they faced the dragon, weaponless?

Once more Hawge dropped in that catapulting dive. This time the sarissas stayed upright, but a shining hail shot up from their midst full in the dragon's face.

In the midst of the volley Hawge twisted and shot out its wings. One got out of time. Beat wildly, un-coordinated. Seemed to crumple. Its own momentum slid Hawge sidelong down the sky as it made a desperate recover, lost it. And hit with a thump that shook the earth, amid a barbaric yell of triumph from three hundred smoke-parched throats.

Very clearly, in the comparative lull as the dragon floundered, I heard Beryx's order. “Present—sarissas. Charge.”

The front rank sarissas came to the horizontal. The square moved.

A phalanx charge is not the cavalry's delirious thunderbolt. It is delivered at a walk, measured, deliberate, and irresistible as death itself. I could picture my friends' faces: Iphas, Errith, Thrim, Asc, all cold with vengeance about to be assuaged.

Hawge had blundered to its feet. It waddled a few steps, clumsy as a grounded albatross, looking over its shoulder as it went. The square came on. Hawge's eyes revolved. Its head snaked along the ground. Then it turned and began lumbering forward too.

Fifty yards. Forty. I could hear Inyx calling them off, steady as if on parade. My fingernails had pierced my palms. Thirty. My throat ached with the expectation of fire. Hawge was breathing it, short pants, oily black smoke shooting above its head. Twenty yards. Inyx yelled, “Go!” And as the ranks broke into a trot to gain momentum the dragon swung its tail.

I think—I hope—most of the front rank died instantly. They were my friends. The tail mowed the entire rank down, smashing them into the ground, hurling them in the air like toys, crushing rib-cages and pelvises inside the bull-hides that could foil fire but not such giant blows. The second rank, trapped in the charge, fell over the bodies with sarissas going all ways as they tripped, the square sides spilt helplessly outward round the fallen, and with a tremendous brazen bellow Hawge lashed fire into the chaos and followed it in with sting and tooth and nail.

I cannot describe the rest: it is blotted by smoke and tears. I remember stray sarissas beating in the murk, the dragon's back that surfaced like a spiny whale, geysers of red-hearted black dust. A sweep of the tail flinging two bodies thirty feet into the air, the flash of steel as someone, in gallant despair, tackled it with a sword. A running archer caught by a fire-blast and turned to a falling meteor. A monstrous claw coming out of the smoke to dig in and twist as the dragon pivoted, and blood spouting from a body—dead, I pray—under the nails. The hideous, hideous noise.