Rogue Dragon (7 page)

The raid had not been planned to free him, although that had been part of it. The raid had not been planned to pick up a dozen or so likely young women, although
that
had been part of it, too. (The women had shrieked and struck their captors and engaged in some semi-ritual wailing until cuffed into silence, but they seemed to have accepted their change in fortune serenely enough after not very long.)

“That Hue seems to think that nothing but what
he
wants, counts, me coney,” old Ma’am Anna had complained. “Well, now. How stupid do he think the Gentlemen are? They know that something doesn’t smell right, yesindeed. Sooner or later, they’re bound to come looking. Now, we North People, we mind our own business. And we do not want any troops and armies coming and poking around. Wars, you know, me boy, wars are catchy things.”

Boiled down, then, the raid had been intended to reestablish the status-quo before the city-states went to arms in order to re-establish it themselves. And, the dragons, she had said, were dead—dead in their enclosures behind the pit. Pausing with a piece of wild honeycomb in his fingers, Jon-Joras asked about that.

“How were the dragons killed, Ma’am Anna? I heard no gunfire. No one could have gotten a good shot by the torchlight, anyway. Besides, they were all marked wrong.”

She nodded, supped noisily from her bowl. After a moment, she wiped her toothless mouth, said, “That’s another thing, you see. Hue and his rogues. Rogue drags can be as bothersome as soldieries, yesindeed. I daresay he intends they all go downriver, towards the hunting country. I suppose he does his best to drive them so. But they don’t, me cockerel, no, they don’t always stay drove…

“How were they killed? Why, we poisoned them. Never mind what poison. Leave at least one of us be able to eat with an easy mind.” She bent over in a spasm of silent laughter.

Breakfast over, the day quite on its way and the sun warmer, Ma’am Anna had the curtains of the litter drawn back and relinquished a layer or two of her coverings. The signal horn sounded, and the nomads got on their way once more. Far off in the bosky distance a faint smudge showed in the air on the horizon. The black stones of the sinister, alien Kar-chee castle would not burn, but just about everything the outlaw Doghunters had carried into it was flammable.

“How did Hue get his scar, do you know?”

Her wrinkled lips came together in a pout. She shook her head. “That was bad, yesindeed. Someone with an -ix to the tail of his name—this was when Hue was just small of size—decided he didn’t find him meek enough. Maybe was drunk, too. However it was, he picked him up by the scruff and tossed him in with a dragon-cockerel that he happened to have around. The cockerel was bigger than Hue was… I don’t altogether blame the man. Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them.”

It was not a barn, exactly, which was burning back there. Her eyes followed his and, evidently, her thoughts, too. “Do they have dragons where you come from, coney?

“No. No, I suppose not. Because you never had no bloody Karches, did you, then? Lucky you. Did you know that they turn into Karches in the night-times? Yesindeed. So you be careful, hear me now, in wandering off in the dark. Particularly if we gets near unto The Bosky. Fierce, terribly fierce, is them Bosky drags.”

Jon-Joras, torn between his desire to hear more of this new aspect of the legend—the dragon as were-Kar-chee—and his desire to hear more of the almost unknown land beyond the official territories of the city-states, decided that if he let her talk he might well hear of both. Which he did.

The nomads apparently knew very well that the dragons were not Kar-chee. How Hue and Hue’s people had formed the notion that they were, Jon-Joras could not guess and didn’t now try. The notion that at certain times and in certain places the dragons shifted their shapes into those of the long since departed Kar-chee was perhaps, however, not much more scientific. If at all.

“… they even changes their smell, me cockerel,” old Ma‘am Anna hissed, wide-eyed in emphasis.

“I know how dragons smell, but how do… how did the—”

“The damned and bloody Karches? You knows that, too. You was in their castle for sure enough, yes indeed.”

Was that faint and alien odor that he had noticed, then, indeed that of the castle-keeping Kar-chee? Faint, faint, so very faint—yet still so distinct. The thought alone was capable of evoking it. Could it have lingered all these centuries? He could not say, could not begin, even, to conjecture. And, as for The Bosky—

Time and time again nomad bands had desired to graze their flocks on the rich and untouched grasses there. But the dragons were so incomparably fiercer in that region that it was long since any herdsmen had even thought of trying. Too, in times past, free farmers—individually and in groups and leagues—had endeavoured either to settle in The Bosky or at at least to pass through it in search of regions where the Syndics’ writs did not run. Where farm land might stay farm land and not become a target-alley or a parade-ground, where potatoes might stay where planted until harvested and not be dug up and trampled into muck because they had impinged on dragon ground. That curious and strange loving hate existing between hunters and hunted… Off, then, their gear and baggage laden aboard crude wagons and on pack-horses, did they have any; or bending beneath the weight themselves, did they have none, the free-farmers had set off for finding places where they might be free indeed and farmers indeed and need nevermore be “dirty doghunters” save on their own account.

“Some come back quicker than they went, young outworlder. It made them content to suffer what they’d suffered in discontent but where the dragons don’t fight unless they’re coaxed or goaded. I says,
‘It
made them…’ What did? Why to see how terrible them awful Bosky drags tore up them as went before them. In their blood they saw them, yesindeed, mere bones and shreds,” Ma’am Anna sighed.

Jon-Joras caught at a word. “‘Some’ came back, you say—?”

“You mean, and what’s of the others? Isn’t it clear? Them as was found torn and scattered, was them that never come back.”

He frowned and mused. There was nothing utterly impossible in this account, nothing of the historical absurdity of confusing Kar-chee with dragon nor of the physical impossibility of the one turning into the other and back again, so. But there remained one considerable question which alone put the whole matter into doubt.

“Are the dragons any bigger or any different there than here?”

“Nope.” Ma’am Anna smacked her gums. “Just fiercer, like I say.”

“But…” And this was it: “Why should they
be
fiercer there? I mean, with no one to hunt them and bother them, you’d think they’d be
less
fierce, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, with inflexible logic; “because I knows they be
more
fierce. As to why, hee hum, old as I am and not fit for much, rather than go and maybe find out and be made into salad meat, by your leave, me coney, I’ll stay over here and in ignorance.”

And there the matter rested.

They were due to meet up with the main horde at about noon; and, at about noon, they did. The camp was, like a Gentleman’s seat, a small city-state of its own. Tents and lean-tos dotted the area for about a mile, the small animals from which the fleeces evidently came milled and bleated, and ponies by the thousands—so it seemed—grazed in hobbles. And in the center was the great circular tent which was the Ma’am’s capitol.

“Mutton!” she directed, as she was being lifted down.

“I want me fat mutton—grilled and crisp and chopped fine!”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“And tomorrow I want the flocks taken up to the white stony brook—that was all burnt over a while back, should be nice, fresh grazing.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

“Tomorrow. Not today. Today I want the children to go up there instead. Have ’em bring all the buckets and baskets—there’ll be good berrying there.”

“Yes, our Ma’am.”

They set her down on a pile of fleeces and blankets raised off the floor, propped her up with pillows.

“Did Cuthy beg Brun’s pardon, publicly, like I said?”

“He did, our Ma’am.”

“Paid him twelve goats, too?”

“Twelve goats, our Ma’am. He wanted to include a wether, and Brun wouldn’t have it, but the Elders said a goat was a goat, so he took it, rather than do without.”

She nodded. “That’s right. There’s many a buck with stones that does the nannies no good; this way he won’t have to wonder… Teach Cuthy to leave Brun’s woman alone. All right! All right! Get out, now! Stop vexing me old head with all your questions. Bring enough mutton for the outworld boy, too. Come sit… of whatever way is comfortable for you… over by me. Now, then—”

She took his hand. “We’ll be here long enough for you to mend. What do you think on doing, once you can ride. again?” He said that he thought he’d rather not ride again at all, asked if she couldn’t send a messenger for a flyer to take him back to Peramis. “Ah, me cockerel, but isn’t that part of the question? What do you think on doing, once you’re back in Peramis?”

Seeing that he was still not understanding her, she explained in detail. What did he plan to say about things? The rogue dragon… the mysterious, secretive Kar-chee castle and what it contained… the nomad raid… He began to catch her drift; asked what she thought he should say.

Slowly, the old head nodded.

“That’s the point. Yesindeed, that’s the point. You see, me coney, few things are ever simple. If you go back and talk free, then the wasp’s-nest is stirred up for sure. The armies come out. We don’t want that, for our own reasons. And when the armies are out of the States, what’s then? Riots, I hear, in Peramis. Put down by the army. Maybe the Dogrobbers would just as soon sacrifice their tricks off in the woods, for a chance to burn things up.”

He had to agree that it was not simple. Certainly, he could not forget what had been done to the son of Aëlorix, his former host, to whose salt he assuredly owed something. Certainly, he could not deny that the outlaws had just grievances. More: they, too, had been his hosts. Finding him wandering near their secret place, they had been justified in taking him prisoner; but they had treated him with kindliness, once he was safe inside.

“Is Hue still alive?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. The men told me they saw him go down, before they had to withdraw. But they’re not sure he wasn’t in shape to get up again. Why?”

He told her why. “
‘They shall all be killed, every one—in the
egg,
and out…’”

“When things reach such a stage,” Jon-Joras said, “the right which is based on having been wronged becomes a wrong in itself.”

The old woman stooped her chin upon her hands. She sighed. “Well… Well… We have to think. Both of us. But not now. Here they are with the mutton. If there is one thing I don’t have to puzzle about, it’s mutton,” she said, contentedly. “I like it fat. And I like it crisp.”

From time to time in the next few days, Jon-Joras thought about his forcibly neglected duties. He knew that Por-Paulo would not blame him or think less of him; besides, the Hunt Company was experienced enough to fill the gap well enough in making arrangements. Meanwhile, there lay open before him the life of the nomad encampment, utterly strange to him except as a half-forgotten paragraph in half-forgotten books. In a way it was far freer than any life he had ever known, but it was subject nonetheless to the sway of law. The tribesmen elected their council of elders and over the elders was the old queen, Ma’am Anna, who ruled them all as the benevolent semi-despotic matriarch of a family. But even old Anna had to go where the grass was green and the water was sweet; even she could not prevent storm and snow and flood and disease.

She gave Jon-Joras a pony, as casually as she might give a child a sweet; the tribe had plenty of ponies, after all (she said), and she could not burden her litter with him forever. He thanked her for the gift—somewhat fearfully, remembering how sore he had been from his first ride—and somewhat reluctantly, realizing that this probably meant he was not going back to Peramis in the immediate future. But there was nothing he could really do about it… except make the most of it.

He learned how to ride the shaggy little beast, gingerly at first, then with growing confidence and enjoyment, over the low swelling hills and flatlands fresh with new herbage; only a fleecy pad for a saddle, only a braided grass rope for a bridle, the sweetsmelling wind in his face instead of the strong musty odor of sheep which hung around the camp site.

Sheep and shepherds alike fell behind him as, food in his saddle-sack and water in his leather bottle, he set as his goal some distant landmark—a wooded hilltop, a pond glittering in the sun, a valley opening wide in welcome—and headed for it. No one, least of all Ma’am Anna, seemed concerned about his possibly not returning, any more than his earlier hosts, the outlaws, had been. He was after all as bound by his limited knowledge of the terrain as by the encircling high black walls around the castle of the swarming, conquering, and now-vanished Kar-chee.

Both Jon-Joras and the tribesmen, however, were in this guilty of one mutual mistake. Both realized that he did not know enough about the countryside to escape successfully. Neither realized that he knew little enough about it to get lost successfully. But he did.

Born and raised upon the infinitely controlled planet which was M.M.
beta,
where everything was so complex as to be simple, so controlled, so subdued, so organized, that even a blind man could hardly lose his way; Jon-Joras—despite theoretically knowing better—did not consider the possibility that one wooded hill, one pond, one valley, might well look just the same to him as another. He had always found his way back successfully before. If by nothing else, he guided himself automatically by the almost tidal regularity of the flocks and herds as they drifted back, campwards, as the day drew to a close.