Here There Be Dragonnes (35 page)

I looked at Ragnar with new respect: a little different from Lady Adiora's method.

The tide was retreating now, making a noise on the pebbles like someone clearing their throat and then spitting. Ragnar waved to the townsfolk not to follow us further.

"We shall go on alone," he said. Alone? Where? Echoes of last night's dreams made my heart beat faster. "Of course there may be little to see: if the creature has eaten recently he may not show himself. But if we stay quiet and tempt him a little, then perhaps—" He beckoned to one of the men, who ran back to one of the huts and reappeared with some strips of dried goat's meat. "Ah, yes: this should do it."

With the chief leading we made our way round the bay to the southernmost tip, climbing steadily all the way and passing through a small flock of horned sheep, almost indistinguishable from their goat-brothers, so unlike the low-slung fatties Brothers Peter and Paul tended: still, I supposed the brothers' sheep would have been hard put to it to find sustenance on these harsher uplands, while Ragnar's sheep looked fit and well on their poor diet. More evidence of how careful husbandry had made this such a prosperous place. I supposed The Ancient would have a "clitch" for all this: "Difficult to tell sheep from goats when both wear horns"?

At last we stood on the edge of the cliff, the breeze from the sea ruffling Moglet's fur and snatching at my mask. The sea foamed and raced beneath us and some twenty feet away was the opposite cliff, crowned by an immense slab of rock that reared precariously over the edge with what looked to me like a dangerous tilt.

"The Look-Out Stone," said Ragnar. "The highest point around. We use it for spying out shoals of fish, for posting a beacon if anyone is overdue and, of course, for spotting the forerunners of the seal-cows in April. But there is a suggestion for building a tower on this side instead: that rock can sway dangerously in a high wind and we're not sure how firmly it's anchored." He sighed. "It seems we can have little use for either till the Wyrme is destroyed. When the seals whelped this year we had promise of good hunting, for there were more than usual and we only took the born-dead or injured as we always do. Then the Wyrme came, and they could not escape. They lost about twenty cows and pups, before the males arrived looking for them. They only got in by dint of numbers, a mad rush on a high tide. But now of course the beast knows where they are and also knows a mass exit will leave the pups behind. The cows will not risk the pups and the bulls will not leave the cows . . ." He sighed again. "And it is not only them, it is us also. We have tried to take to the boats and carry on our fishing but the Wyrme overturns them and anyone who swims is immediate prey. We are trapped and the seals are trapped! This is why we welcomed you, knowing that, through you, the second part of the prophecy would come to pass." And he began to recite.

"And the seven shall strive: and the White Wyrme shall wither.

And behold! all shall be: as before and better."

"Doesn't he know any nice cheerful little ditties?" muttered Corby. "Anyway, he's missed out that bit about the road west. And gifts . . . Fat chance! Looks as if we are trapped as tight as the rest. After all that mumbo jumbo can you see 'em saying 'Bye-bye, thanks for trying and all that?' No, we ain't going north, south or east, let alone west—"

"Well, then," said Snowy, "put your tongue back in its beak, where it belongs, and use your eyes and your cunning brain to see if you can come up with a solution! It could be your turn, you know."

There it was: "turns" again. Moglet's turn, Corby's turn—

"Watch," said Ragnar, who of course had heard none of this by-play. "Down there, in that wide cleft in the base of the opposite cliff where the water is calmer . . . That's where he rests and watches and waits." And with that he tossed a strip of goat's-flesh out as far as he could.

Nothing. We watched the meat sink slowly in the clear water beyond where the tide was racing out, until it touched bottom some twenty feet down. Ragnar took another strip of flesh; I was still gazing at the first and the water appeared to be cloudier, as though something had stirred the grey-black sand. Ragnar flung the second piece.

A gull, a yearling with less sense than it should have, flung itself seawards in a dive after the meat; they touched water together and for a moment I believed the bird had won, but there was a boiling beneath us, a great rearing and with the speed of my thought bright blood sprayed between great sharp teeth, teeth like a hundred bone needles, and the blood became the darker colour of the sea and there was a white, grey-tipped feather floating and nothing more . . .

The air was filled with the screaming of sea birds: gulls, guillemots, tern, as they rose from crevices in the cliff upwards from the sea, and the harsh cries of raven, crow and cormorant who banked and wheeled from their perches on the rearing rocks. Bird mingled with bird, and screamed with fright and mourned with despair and watched the feather as it slipped, alone and broken, away with the ebbing tide. Black and white, grey and grey, and the birds calling and Corby answering and trying to fly from my arms on one wing only, and me clasping him tight to save him from further harm, and the stone in my belly hurting—

And then Snowy called, loud and clear. What had been senseless flight settled into a pattern, rising and falling like the midsummer dance of gnats over a pond, and the voices softened and fell quiet. Corby ceased struggling and lay quiet too, except to say in a small voice: "Those are my brothers—if only I could fly!" I could do nothing save stroke his untidy feathers in sympathy.

Conn nudged me. "Did you ever see anything so fearsome, Thingumajig?"

Down there, some five feet below the surface, its body undulating with the unseen currents, was a great white worm-like creature. Despite the distortion of the water I could see quite clearly; I suppose it was not a true white, more a grey-tan colour but the green water gave it luminescence. At first, horror made it a hundred feet long and twenty wide at the least, but when sense reasserted itself I suppose it must have been about eighteen to twenty feet in length, including a flat, splayed, scooping tail. It was segmented, but the shell seemed to be soft, judging by the ease with which it arched and bent its spine; there were two vestigial suckers on the foremost segment behind the head, and double gills like fringed curtains. The head itself was the most frightening of all: it looked much as an eel's but the eyes were positioned much closer on the top of its head and the mouth was wider and set, as far as I could see, with a triple row of the fearsome, needle-sharp teeth.

I shivered. "Do you—" I said, "do you think it is the only one of its kind—or—or could there be others?"

"Well," said Conn. "The sight of that little monster does bring to mind a tale I heard once, told by one who had returned from seas on the other side of the world. He said it had been narrated to him (and I cannot vouch for its veracity, mind, though one of his longer tales about a great grey beast like a mountain with an extra arm in the middle of its head I do know to be true, for my friend Fitzalan had seen such) but, as I was saying, this traveller had been told that in a sea as warm as new milk, a seaman had fallen overboard and by chance bobbed up again where a lucky rope had saved him. But he had come aboard quite mad, babbling of a great forest of worms such as this one, waving beneath many fathoms like a field of sun-white grain. All thought him touched and suspected a
knock on the head had addled his brains, but he insisted and it was all written down by the captain in his log."

Ragnar had been paying keen attention to this story and nodded his head. "The water you spoke of was warm; hereabouts, even in winter, there is a warm current that brings the fish in close to our bay. Maybe such a worm as you speak of could have lost its way and followed such?"

It all sounded highly unlikely to me, but here it was and here were we, and I was not looking forward to closer acquaintance. Neither were the others, to judge by the careful way they avoided looking at us and each other. There was not even a "Lemme see! Lemme see better . . ." from Pisky.

Ragnar brought us back sharply to the task in hand. "Well now, you have seen our monster: you can see our problem. I realize you will have to think about this, so I will leave you to confer."

"A conference was just what I had in mind," said Conn, as easy as if he were discussing the weather, and looking Ragnar straight in the eye. "Of course, you realize that deep magic such as we shall have to use takes a while to conjure . . ."

We watched the chief out of sight.

I turned to Conn admiringly. "You were great! Just what idea have you got?"

"Not a one, not a one in the world, Thingummy, but I thought we needed a breather. That fellow is not going to let us out of his sight until his little miracle-workers have got rid of that—that creature down there, and I thought we could talk more freely amongst ourselves. Now then, who's got an idea?"

No one, it seemed. I glanced desperately round our circle.

"We cannot dig it out," said Snowy. "Nor lead it away."

"Fire's no good," said Puddy gloomily.

"We can't spike it or claw it or carve it up," said Moglet.

"Can't starve it either," said Pisky, from the bottom of his bowl.

Which left little. I could think of nothing, save drinking the sea dry, and even I knew better than to make that sort of suggestion.

Eventually, aware of an uncharacteristic silence, we all looked at the culprit. We looked so hard that Corby started shifting from claw to claw and muttering to himself.

"Well?" I said.

"Well, nothing! Just don't expect me to come out pat with the solution. Still . . ."

I think we all shuffled forward a pace.

"Still . . ." he continued, musingly, "there's something a-tapping from the inside of the shell. Probably as addled as the rest of the eggs in the nest, but you never know . . . Tell you what: all right if we go into one of those huddles, like what we used to? You know, when we all held beaks and claws and things under Thing dear's cloak, in the good old days of Her Ladyship? Always felt it concentrated my mind wonderfully . . ."

It was stuffy and warm under my cloak and I was only too conscious of how silly we must have looked as we wriggled together, until I heard Snowy's thoughts through the thick folds and felt Conn's hand on my shoulder.

"Ideas, ideas," they seemed to say. "Think, think; concentrate, concentrate. Give Corby your minds, your help . . ."

Deliberately I tried to make my mind go blank, but still a series of pictures flashed across my mind, like the glint of sunlight on metal, seen a long way off. Cliffs; movement of green water; a rock; birds, flocks of birds; pecking beaks; the sky turning over—

"Got it!" cried Corby. "Leastways . . ."

I flung back the cloak and we all blinked in the midday sun.

"Gorrem-nidea," said Corby. "A possibility, anyways. Beaks out: can feel the sun. Now to chip away the rest of the shell . . ." I realized that what I had thought foreign language and complicated imagery merely meant that he had gone back to his nestling days. "Can't say for certain . . . Still covered with egg yolk at the moment. But, it might work . . ."

"What?" cried Conn in exasperation.

"Not in words. Not at the moment. Lot of thinking to do . . ."

"How can we help?" asked Snowy, practical as always.

Corby glanced up, but his gaze was abstracted. "Hmmm? Help? Oh—yes, you might at that. I need to get around this bay to the other side. Over by the big rock. Perhaps, if you wouldn't mind like, you could give me a lift . . ."

And so, for the rest of the afternoon, as the rest of us watched and wondered, Snowy or Conn carried him round the bay, back and forth the three miles or so that separated one headland from the other. Each time he reached the other side he was met by an increasing number of birds, many of them crows as ragged as himself. They all seemed to crowd and confer around the base of the great lookout rock that reared up across from us, but no one said anything specific, although Conn looked thoughtful when he came back with Corby the third time, and Snowy was obviously in on the secret too. For secret it was: Corby refused to discuss his idea with the rest of us, afraid, perhaps, that he might look a fool if it didn't work.

The only clue came from Moglet, who at one stage remarked frivolously that it might save time if we ran a cat's cradle between the two headlands, and Corby looked at her so sharply that I thought we were on to something. Unfortunately, I didn't know what.

His behaviour later that day when we returned to the town, also had us puzzled. He first asked Pisky if he could practise dropping pebbles in his bowl, and met an indignant refusal when the first one narrowly missed one of the snails. Then he asked Conn to fill him a leather bucket with sea-water and by dusk was still picking stones from the beach and dropping them in the water until the container was full, then was asking Conn to empty them out and repeating the process until it was too dark to see.

If we were mystified, so were the townsfolk, and in the end Ragnar himself came down to watch.

"This is obviously powerful magic," he observed, but I could see one hand was stroking his beard and he was frowning.

"Yes," said Conn. "And it works better, it does, if the whole world is not breathing down our necks. Some things are meant to be secret, you know."

And, as everyone retreated precipitately, it was only I who caught his irreverent wink.

Later that night, Corby asleep before any by the smouldering fire, I tried Conn again.

"Can't you tell us?"

"Tell you what?"

"What's this business with the pebbles? Why did you ask Ragnar tonight about the weather and the times of the tides and so on?"

He pinched my cheek through the mask, but his eyes were dancing.

"'Tis Corby's secret, so it is, and it's for him to tell. Go to sleep, Thingy, and perhaps you'll learn all in the morning." And he ruffled my hair with an intimate caressing gesture that sufficiently banished sleep. If it had only been the puzzle over Corby's scheme for ridding the town of the White Wyrme I might have dropped off eventually, but what does one do when one tingles and throbs and glows from nose to toes? It wasn't as though he had meant it as something more than the pat he would give Snowy's flank, the tickle behind Moglet's ear or under Puddy's chin—My stupid, vulnerable inside made me want to make more of it, to kid myself that he had a special feeling for me, that he even looked beneath the hunched back, the mask, the hidden ugly face, and saw someone to love. I knew also that it was no good for me, for us, to think this way. Ever since we had rescued him from that ditch, so many moons away, I had loved him. And although the adventures we had undergone had bred an easy, superficial comradeship that sometimes helped me forget my hopeless love, it was at times like these when I lay unable to sleep; at dawn when we woke to a new day; at evening when the night cloaked our familiar forms; when we were nearest in joint endeavour and when we were farthest, like the time when he had conceived his passion for the Lady Adiora—it was at all these times that I held fast in my heart, knowing, hoping, despairing, realizing, the love I knew would never give me peace.