Rogue Dragon (3 page)

“Chick-boys… what are they doing back so soon?”

The boys—some of them actually
were
boys, shock-headed imps with gaptoothed grins, never having known a day’s school or a pair of shoes; others were all ages up to gray-beards who had been
boys
forty years ago—beckoned their lord and set down what they were carrying. These, as Jon-Joras came up, proved to be wicker baskets, covers tied on with ropes of grass; from within them came a shrill twittering sound.

“What’s up, boys.”

All talking at once, they undid the baskets. “Ah, now, Nasce‘, looka here at these beauties—” “Isn’t they a fine lot, Nasce’?” “Have a eye on’m, won’t y‘, Nasce’—” They held up about a dozen young dragons, deep yellow with just a faintest tinge of green along the upper body in some of them.

“Very nice, very nice,” Aëlorix said, brusquely. “But if you’ve slacked off searching just to show me a batch of chicks—No. You wouldn’t. What’s up?”

They fell silent, eyes all turning to one man who stood by the sole unopened basket. He opened it now, reached in gingerly, winced, lunged, and drew out something which brought a roar from his lord. “What in blethers are you dragging
that
back for? It’s not a chick, it’s a cockerel—do you have six fingers and want to lose one?—and a marked cockerel too! What—?”

The man with the gawky dragon-child needed both of his hands to hold it, but another man pointed to the mark, the gray
X
on the underside which would grow whiter with age. Aëlorix bent over, silently, to examine it as the chick-boy nudged the scaly under-hide with his scarred thumb, and the dragon-cockerel chittered and snapped at him.

The Gentlemen snapped up straight, his face red and ugly, criss-crossed with white lines Jon-Joras had not noticed before. “What son of a dirty crone marked that?” he cried. His rage did not surprise his men.

“Marky? Marky?”

An old—a shambling old chick-boy—whose incredibly acid-scarred hands testified to the contents of the ugly can he carried, shook his head slowly and sadly, eyes cast down. It might have been over the sorrow of a ruined grand-daughter.

“Not my stuff, Master Ae,” he said. “Nope. That’s a coarse, karchen stuff, very coarse, y’ see.” He prodded it with a caricature of a finger. “See how deep it’s cut? I dunno a marky ’round here, ’r north, ’r south, who makes ’r uses stuff like such. And look where he put ’n, too, the dirty son of a kar-chee’s egg—”

“Yes,” his master said, bitterly, “Yes, look. Cut its throat,” he ordered, abruptly, and stalked away with quick, angry steps. Suddenly he stopped and turned back. “Not a word to any one! The Ma’am is not to hear of this.” It was a long few minutes before his breathing calmed enough for him to say to his mute guest, “Young man, you must amuse yourself for a while. I must counsel with my neighbors on something. Pray pardon and excuse.”

But the Ma’am had already heard. Her weeping was loud as Jon-Joras came into the house. He thought it was best to make excuses of demanding duties, and to depart. It was not urged that he change his mind.

Peramis was not much different from other of the city-states of Prime World, that ancient planet from which the race of Man had begun its spread across the galaxies. It had stripped itself bare, exhausting its peoples and minerals, in launching and maintaining that spread. So it was that, population dwindled and resources next to nil, at a time when the son-and daughter-worlds were occupied in their own burgeoning imperialisms, old Earth had had to stand alone when the Kar-chee—the black, gaunt, mantis-like Kar-chee—came swooping down from their lairs around the Ring Stars. Alone and almost defenseless. And, defenseless (in all save their native wit) and alone, what remained of her people had had to fight their way up. Small wonder the very name of the conquerors had, in its corrupted but still recognizable form, become a common curse.

The establishment of Confederation, and a belated recollection of and attention to the first home of man, found scarcely a remnant of the old status still remaining. Gone were the great cities, gone the great states and leagues of states. There might have remained even less than a little, had not the Kar-chee been perhaps more interested in the sea than in the land. In response to impelling plans and reasons known only to themselves, masses of land had been blasted and submerged; others had been heaved up out of the primordial muck. Rivers had been changed in their courses, mountains laid low, mountains raised high.

The old maps were of limited use, where useful at all; and Jon-Joras, gazing at the slow-turning, giant model globe in the lobby of the Lodge, was obliged to forget his ancient history. That done, it was no great feat to locate Peramis, Sartor, Hathis and Drogue, the four city-states which—nominally, at least—divided between themselves the land-mass (more than a peninsula, less than a subcontinent) most frequented these days by those bound on dragon-hunts. And beyond was the uninhabited terra incognita called “The Bosky.”

Aëlorix of Aëlorix had been right enough in his way. Dragon might perhaps not be the deadliest game, but they were the most prestigious. In ancient legends, preserved in richest form in the worlds of the Inner Circle, those first settled in the great wave of expansion, there were references to dragons. They did not seem to fit the present-day creatures at all. One theory had it that the dragons of the mythic cycles had retreated deep into forests and jungles (or, perhaps, the depths of the seas) and so escaped the attention of reputable historians, evolution… mutation… accounting for the apparent changes. Had the rupturing of the deeps, perhaps, brought them forth again? Jon-Joras wondered.

Others would insist that the Kar-chee brought the beasts with them, pointing to the existence in all their ruined “castles” of great sunken amphitheaters which the remnants of Man on Earth united in calling “dragon-pits.”

One thing alone seemed fairly certain despite all the several theories: Before the Kar-chee came, if there were dragons on Prime World, no one knew of it. And by the time the Kar-chee ceased to trouble, the presence of the dragons was one of the great realities of Terrene life. Somewhere, somewhen during the Kar-chee Reign and the chaos, the mystique of the dragon-hunts had developed. And by now, centuries after, it was the only resource of the despoiled planet. Whatever the explanation, it was all very strange, indeed.

“Odd to think we all came from there,” someone, pointing, said over Jon-Joras’s shoulder as he stood musing before the circling globe.

He nodded, half-turned. It was the Confederation archaeologist, a certain Dr. Cannatin, whom he had, from time to time, heard lamenting in bar-lounge or Lodge-lobby the effort involved (and the money!) in dredging up a single artifact of the ancient days—or rejoicing on the latest one he had nevertheless managed to find.

“How is your new dig coming along?” Jon-Joras asked politely.

Cannatin, middle-aged, and fat, and depilated according to the custom of his native world (wherever it was), looked rather like an ambulatory egg. His round mouth made a grimace. “Hardly getting anywhere at all. The plebs… that’s not what they call them here, is it? No matter. Dog-robbers? Doghunters. Free farmers, as they like to be called—hard people to deal with. They would rather dig potatoes than build sites. Hunt ruins? Rather hunt dogs. And I have to pay through the nose when I can get them, too.” He sighed.

“I’m thinking of giving up around here, setting up a base camp on the far side of the river, near Hathis.”

Jon-Joras asked if the lower class in Hathis was more amenable to archaeology, and Cannatin shook his naked head. “Not thinking of
them,
I’m thinking of the nomads. The tribespeople. There’s a few of their main trails converge over that way. Now, these people going wandering in and out and all around. They must know of sites nobody’s even heard of. So I’m moving. And
soon—”

The sudden note of urgency surprised Jon-Joras, but before he could inquire, Cannatin, with a mumbled excuse, hurried away. Jetro Yi was not at the Lodge, so Jon-Joras thought he would look for him at the Hunt Company’s offices, seeing more of the “state” en route. A number of pony-traps in the road outside the spacious lodge grounds solicited his custom, but he preferred to walk. Usually the streets in this part of Peramis town were quiet, with few pedestrians; but scarcely had Jon-Joras crossed through the park at the next crossroads when he began to hear crowd noises.

A bend in the stately, tree-lined promenade brought him in sight of the throng, moiling around on the wide mall in front of an important-looking building with a white plastered portico. He had seen its picture in the Company’s travel brochures, reduced to miniature, clients not being much interested in the local architecture; but for a moment he could not recall what it was… the State Hall?… the Chamber of the Board of Syndics?

A blind beggar squatting on the pave lifted his head as Jon-Joras approached. “No room in the Court, your Big,” he croaked, raising his cupped palms and asking a donation. Jon-Joras gave him something and, wondering at the crowd, asked what was going on in court. The beggar canted his head as if to assure himself that no one else was near, said, “Ah, your Big, it’s that dirty Doghunter what killed the Gentleman. For why? Claims the Hunts people trampled his ’tato patch. Course they paid ’n for it, always does. But them Doghunters is mean greedy, never gives nothing to a blind man, wanted more, he done. Gentleman gives him a piece of stick to bite on, they fights and he kills ’n. Terrible thing, your Big…”

Jon-Joras left him whining and walked on to the mall. A small group of Gentlemen were standing close together in earnest talk; one of them, with repeated angry gestures towards a larger clot of plebs, seemed urging some sort of action. Jon-Joras’s path led him athwart the larger group, and he paused a ways away to listen.

“—dirt, less than dirt,” a burly man in a greasy buckskin which left half his broad, hairy chest exposed, was saying. “First comes their own kind, then comes their bloody dragons, then comes their damned servants what kisses their backsides, and then comes their pishy customers from out-worlds. Out-worlds! Did out-worlds help us when the Kar-chee come?” His hearers growled and shifted. “And as for us, ‘Less than dirt,’ I says. We is good enough to hunt the wild dogs in the woods to keep things safe, but no more’n that. ‘Free farmers,’ we calls ourselfs. Hah! How free c’n we be when our fields what we plants with sweat is no more to them than a path to run on or a wastegrounds to tromple on?”

Times there are when the much goes slow and the little, quick; but now it was that the much went quick—and quicker yet. A cry echoed down the mall, all heads turned, nearer, near, from the Court:
“Guilty! Guilty! Death!”
A shout, fiercely triumphant, from the Gentlemen—the man in the buckskin hurled himself upon them—in an instant the mall was a mass of bloody turmoil into which Jon-Joras felt himself carried away. He struck out, was struck back at.

The crowd, now become a mob, surged back and forth. He fell on one knee, lifted his arms to ward off being trampled on. But the mob had swarmed elsewhere. For the moment he was safe, and then, looking around as he began to rise, he saw the girl on the ground to his right. She was slender and slight and pale, a trickle of blood upon her face.

He started to lift her up. She opened her eyes, her face convulsed with rage; she struck at him, leaped away free. In another moment she was lost in the screaming crowd.

The mob did not manage to free the convicted man but did manage to wreck the Court House thoroughly, and was in the act of burning it when the hastily summoned soldiery attacked. The standing army of the City-State of Peramis was small, but it was disciplined and the mob was not. Hence the battle, though nasty and brutish, was also short. The plebs, still roaring defiance, scattered, leaving their dead behind them.

The murderer, who had killed the Gentleman in a fight over more compensation for his hunt-trampled crops, was executed as scheduled; and in the usual manner: bound and gagged and hanged by his feet in the main square, he was filled with arrows by a squad of masked archers.

Whether this was a mistake or not, was much discussed at the Lodge. Chief Commissioner Narthy, killing time until the arrival of the weekly aerospace ferry for ConfedBase—the only area of Earth under direct Galactic rule, it was located on the landmass which the Kar-chee had created out of the Andaman Islands—“Hunter” Narthy treating the lounge-bar to a farewell round of drinks, insisted it was a mistake.

“Why, they’ve given the mob a martyr,” he said, sipping. “Everyone of those poor, down-trodden plebs that witnessed the execution is a potential rebel leader. No… the execution should have been carried out privately, if at all. Then a program of education and land-reform, taking into cognizance the legitimate aspirations of the pleb-peoples—”

But an elegantly-dressed trader from the Blue Worlds shook his head. On the contrary, he said, to do in secret what had always been done in public would have been to admit to a fear of the mob. And nothing, he said, is more calculated to increase a mob’s power.

“Besides,” he went on, caressing his glass,
“what
legitimate aspirations of the pleb-peoples’ exist? Every Doghunter would like to be a Gentleman, and who can blame him? But who can agree that this is a legitimate aspiration? An armada can’t consist of all admirals, can it? As for the right of Hunts to go across plowed land—why, it’s part of the age-old principal of eminent domain. This planet has no other resource but its Hunts, no other justification for Confederation being here—or for anyone from outside ever visiting the place.”

A middle-aged Company PR man nodded. “And without us,” he said, “the place would sink back into barbarism. You can’t base a civilization on planting potatoes. No, we owe it to our ancient Mother World to continue our fructifying contact with it.”

However convinced the lounge-bar was, much of the population of Peramis thought otherwise. The atmosphere in the streets was hostile, several visitors were jostled or stoned, and that night a Gentleman’s country seat was attacked and burned and a number of its loyal servants slain. All in all, Jon-Joras thought he understood why Dr. Cannatin had decided to set up his base of operations elsewhere. He sought out Jetro Yi.