Rogue Dragon (2 page)

Somewhere downwind the cow-drag once again blared her presence and her need; again, replying and following, the bull bellowed. Aëlorix listened, his face puckered.

He shook his head, seemed faintly puzzled, faintly disturbed. Jon-Joras asked if anything was wrong.

“No… Not really at all. I know the cow… don’t mean we’ve met, socially, but one becomes familiar with the calls of all the drags around, sooner or later… But I don’t know the bull. Well, well.” He took his guest by the arm. “Come along. Aëlorix, ho!”

Aëlorix-the-place seemed less an estate than a city-state of its own, repeating on a smaller scale the pattern into which all the civilized parts of ancient Earth had formed after the planet’s emergence from the dark and painful chaos of the Kar-chee Reign. Its fields and groves were pleasant to see after the somber forests, and at first Jon-Joras could not tell which of the many wooden buildings clustering closely where brook and river met was supposed to be his host’s seat.

A scene in the market-place or courtyard quickly diverted his thoughts from this. A group was gathered around two men dressed in dirty hides who were arguing with what, by his manner, appeared to be an upper servant. This one looked up at the entrance of the Gentleman and said, “Ah, here’s His Nascence.”

“Here’s the Big,” muttered one of the men in leather-expressing the same thought in cruder speech. They looked to be brothers. And they looked sullen. One of them now picked up a filthy fiber bag, tumbled its contents on the cobbled ground. Jon-Joras stepped back. They were the severed heads of animals, one huge one with mottled teeth and bloody muzzle, the others tiny.

“There, now, Big,” the man rumbled. “Look a’ them!”

“Mmm…” Aëlorix, noncommittal, gazed down. “What say, Puedeskant? Eh?”

“They gets their yearly dole,” his man growled, stubborn.

“But look a’ the
size
a’ she!” one of the brothers protested. “Now, Big, ain’t such a karchen sizey bitch—and all o’ them karchen pups, look how many!—ain’t them worth a bonus, Big?”

Aëlorix grunted, prepared to move on, paused. To Puedeskant he said, “Give them some fish, then.” The brothers seemed a little appeased. Jon-Joras, looking back, saw the steward unclasp a knife and slash the ears of the strange animals. His host, following the look, smiled. “So they don’t take the heads elsewhere, try the same trick. Dirty chaps.”

“But who are they?”

“Doghunters… Up here, guest—these steps.” They began upon a long covered wooden walkway, curving gently upward and to the right, gardened courtyards on either side and potted plants and caged birds lining the rail below and above on the walk itself. The younger man admired the neatness and the taste of the scene, but tried to fit the spoken phrase into his recollection of his readings.
Doghunters…

Suddenly the key fitted and the wards turned. “Free farmers!” he exclaimed.

He saw his host’s mouth give a slight twist. “Fancy name,” he said. “Doghunters. Useful in their way. But—dirty fellows.” Somewhere ahead music sounded, as different from the elaborate orchestrations of his home world as it was from the crude—though, in its setting, appropriate—harshness of the hunt musics. The covered walk continued to curve on ahead, but the two took a broad branch to the left. The clean planking here was covered with soft reed mats on which designs had been traced in red.

The same motifs were extended and elaborated on the oiled-paper windows of the high screen door whose panels parted silently to admit them; and the melody grew louder. Jon-Joras found himself in a place so strange to him that he stopped short and drew in his breath. It was more a hall than a room, but it contained things in it never seen by him in any hall before. Built around part of a hillside, seemingly, it had a little waterfall plashing and purling in one corner of it; and the tiny stream moved in its channel across the floor to a pool in the center. Bright colored fish swam and darted there. In another section a garden of stepped-back semicircular shelves rose around and retreated from a tall, cylindrical aviary, a rainbow of birds which provided their own background to the music.

The source of this was in a floor of light from a windowed cupola: a dark-skinned woman in a full, embroidered robe. She sat, unseeing, at her instrument, from which came the flow of tinkling sounds, her ringed fingers moving across the keys with stiff but beautiful precision. Suddenly she saw or heard, perhaps felt, them. The music ceased. Jon-Joras might not have been there, for all the notice she took.

“Ae, what news?” she cried.

“The usual,” he said, shrugging. “A hunt—an outworlder. Usual kill. Too quick, though—”

Lustrous eyes, beautiful tan face expressed something between anger and distress. “I don’t mean that! Don’t dissemble—what
news?”

He hesitated; she saw it; he saw that she saw it. “You make too much of trifles, ma’am—”

“Ae!”

“Nothing but a bull-drag. Southward in Belroze Woods. His epithalamion. I didn’t seem to recognize his cry. That’s all.”

An expression which was not relief, quite, but which yet relaxed the look of tense concern, passed across her lovely face. It did not linger long. Her long fingers left the instrument, came together before her throat, and clasped.

“I do not like it,” she said, almost as if to herself. “No. No. No… I do not like it…”

Although the 3D scoping equipment here on Prime World was as good as anywhere in the multi-world Confederation (“the lands of the Starry Compact,” as Por-Paulo had called it in a speech—inwardly wincing, so he confided in Jon-Joras, at the purple phrase), the local economy did not run to any viewing system: the Hunt scenes could be shown off-world, not there. Communications were non-visual. Some faint reflection that 2D was surely at least possible had engaged Jon-Joras’s mind, but not for long. Prime World was, as far as the Hunt Company was concerned, chiefly a game preserve; had been little more for centuries. The hand of the Confederation rested lightly, very lightly here. What was good enough for the Hunt Company in this now remote and passed-by globe seemed good enough for the Confederation.

The face of the communicator was nothing but an instrument board, and Jetro Yi, when he called in as directed next morning, was nothing but a voice.

“I’m lining up one of the best Hunters for your principal, P.M.,” he said, in his usual important tones. “A Gentleman by the name of Thuemorix. One of the
best—”

“That’s good, Company.”

“He’s promised to draw us a prime bull. A five.”

“How’s that?”

“A
five.
Dragons are at prime at five years. After that, well, they begin to go downhill. And before that, too green. I mean, huh-huh, literally as well as figuratively, huh-huh. How would it look for your king to come back with a skin that anyone who
knows
anything, well, they could at one glance just tell by the color that he hadn’t had a first-class hunt? Wouldn’t look good at all. You take some of these pot-bellied parvenus, come here in a hurry, all
they
want is the prestige, well, huh-huh, if they draw a hen-dragon or an old crone, who’s going to know the difference, the circles
they
move in; skin could be pea-green or rusty-black. But not for your principal, no sir, nothing to worry about.”

And he pumbled on and on. There was nothing immediately requiring Jon-Joras’s attention. In a few days he expected to have a lodge lined up for him to look at, to be let with staff while the owners went south on a long visit. “But nothing immediate. So just enjoy your stay with His High Nascence.”

“All right, Company.”

“And I’ll report tomorrow morning.”

“All right, Company.” He flicked off before Jetro Yi could give a resume of all the face-to-face conversations he had had with Jetro Yi. When you had heard him once you had heard him forevermore—unless you had a boundless appetite for the commerce of the hunt.

Leaving the communicator, he strolled at ease through the charming, rambling house out towards the by-buildings in which he knew he would find his host inspecting the livestock. Aëlorix was in the deer-sheds, greeted him with a wave of his hand towards a fat gray doe that was being washed around the udders prior to milking.

“Beauty, isn’t she? Won two prizes.”

“I must accept that judgment, sir. We have none like this out my way, on M.M.
beta.”

“No, I suppose not… This your king’s first hunt?”

Jon-Joras tentatively stroked the doe’s soft muzzle. It was Por-Paulo’s first
dragon
hunt, yes. (“That’s the only kind that counts,” his host said firmly, with the self-contained assurance of an untraveled provincial.) Jon-Joras described Por-Paulo’s three quests for sundi in the swamps of Nor, before his first election—the absolute protective coloration of the sundi—how (so the king had described it) it seems as if a triangular piece of swamp suddenly hurtles through the air. “It’s not a game for the slow, sir. Instant reflexes, or death.”

“Mmm…”

“He’s gone five or six times for dire-falcons, too, out of the aeries of Gare. A thousand, two thousand feet up, if you miss—”

“Mmm…” Insecurely mounted on one winged creature and aiming at another, fiercer one, as it swoops and spins and dives, hooked beak and razor talons. But all Aëlorix said was, “Mmmm… I don’t deny there seems to be an element of danger. But you can get
that,
you know, from all I hear (oh, wouldn’t go myself if you paid me), just trying to cross a road in one of the populous planets. No. A hunt, you see—”

They left the deer-shed, host courteously leading guest by the wrist, and crossed a wide place of beaten earth. “—is not a mere matter of
danger.
Not a dragon hunt, at any rate. It’s a matter of ritual, art, music, skill, color, tradition. There’s more to it than just exposing yourself to a chunk of mud with teeth in it. And this is an acknowledged fact. Ask any Company man, ‘What’s your most popular, most sought-after, most expensive hunt?’ One answer. ‘Dragon.’ It was true, this last. Jon-Joras said nothing.

“Furthermore—” and here Aëlorix suddenly ceased looking rather pontifical, and exceedingly grim, “furthermore, these other items of game (if so you call them), what are they to those that hunt them? Nothing, really. Trophies. Mere sport. Nothing more. Whereas, the
dragons,”
his mouth curled down, “we hate them. Don’t be in any error about that.
We hate them!”

This came as completely surprising to Jon-Joras, for nothing he had heard previously and nothing in Aëlorix’s voice as he had discussed them earlier, had prepared him for this sudden emotion. It was as though the man had just remembered… and remembered a most unpleasant memory, too.

“Why?” he asked, astonished.

With a grimace and an abrupt gesture, the Master said, “It was the Kar-chee… They were the Kar-chee’s dogs. They hunted us. Now we hunt them.” Then the mask dropped again and he said, pleasantly, “Come and see how the training’s coming on.”

Jon-Joras, wondering mightily but saying nothing, yielded to the friendly hand upon his back, and walked on as desired.

On one side of the wide place a group of young, naked-chested archers were shooting at training targets. An elderly bowmaster with stained white moustachios walked up and down behind them, a switch in his hand. The targets hung high in the air and swayed in the wind; whenever a cadet made what was deemed too bad a shot—
whisshh!—
the switch came down across the lower part of the back. “Mm—
hm,”
the Gentleman signified his approval. “Nothing better for the aim. Notice how careful old Fae is never to catch the shoulder-muscles. Ah… I see my boy’s had one miss already this morning. Let’s see if he has another.”

They paused. Aëlorix’s younger son, a chestnut-haired boy in his middle-teens, stood in his place at line, a thin red wheal marking his skin just above his belt. The old man barked, the boy whipped out an arrow, raised his bow, let fly. Jon-Joras could not even see where the shot landed, but his host made a satisfied noise. The bowmaster paced his slow way down the line, said not a word of praise.

On the other side of the field several squads of bannermen danced about with bare poles. A sudden thought entered Jon-Joras’s mind, passed his lips before he had time to consider if it were polite to mention it. “Isn’t this sort of an establishment expensive to maintain?”

“In my case, yes, because I like to see my people here at home, not hired out for Hunts all over the place. And I don’t take Hunt contracts, myself. Don’t have to. My older boy won’t have to, either. But I suppose the younger will, unless I divide Aëlor’ in my will, and I won’t. Don’t believe in it. Keep estates in one piece. I’ve got a smaller place up the river and he shall have that, and I’ll start him off with a small establishment of his own. The Company will see that he gets a few good contracts until his reputation firms up. (That’s where most of your best Hunt Masters come from: younger sons, you know.) The Company knows me, I know the Company. Hate to think if we had to depend on Confederation.”

He did not elaborate, but added, a trifle defensively, “Not that we, not that I, have to depend on the Company, either. Far back as memory goes, this family has never had to buy a haunch of venison, a peck of potatoes, or an ell of common cloth. Show me a Gentleman that does and I’ll show you a family going down hill,” he rambled on, proudly. “That’s how Roedeskant got his estate, you know. Family that had it, never mind their name, extinct in the male line, anyway; they went
down
and he went
up.
Well, he earned it, I credit him, yes. Council of Syndics shall change his name to Roedorix at the next Session, or I’ve lost all my influence and shall engage myself as a Doghunter.”

They paused for him to watch the fletchers at work and to test a new batch of arrowheads with his thumbnail along the edges. He poked into a pile of potatoes and satisfied himself that the ones underneath were as good as those on top. He sampled the cheeses and sausages and the apples to see that they were being properly stored, and was en route to the armory to show Jon-Joras his huntguns, when a party of several coming towards them through a grove of trees sighted them and called out.