Rogue Dragon (8 page)

He never thought to ask, and no one thought to inform him, that the lands towards which he rode that day had been so thoroughly grazed that the flocks and herds had been diverted from them, sent elsewhere. Once outside the perimeter of the camp Jon-Joras rode through empty fields -but this meant nothing to him. He noted the brook to leftwards, and headed in its general direction. But much broken land lay between them, and the source of the stream was in one of the many declivities he was bound to avoid. So when, at last, he finally saw a brook to his left, he did not realize that it was not the same brook but another and a farther one. Guiding himself by its course, eventually he turned the pony’s head and began (so he thought) to ride back towards the encampment.

The cooling air and the still-empty landscape told him of his escape. But it was an escape as useless as it was inadvertent, one of which he could make no use. He had no idea of where he was, none of where he wanted to go, and (he realized with some surprise) little of even where he wanted to be. There on the hilltop in the sallow light of lowering day, M.M.
B
seemed infinitely far off in space and time and reality, Peramis was the mere thin fabric of a dream, and the encampment of the tribe little more than a setting from a 3D drama or travelogue.

He sighed. After a moment he began riding his mount in a slow circle on the rise of ground. He saw nothing and nothing and yet nothing. Sunshine and clouds wheeled in counter-circles, slotted shafts of light broke through the gathering dusk, and in one such thrust of brightness he saw three small figures riding along far away and below. He thumped the pony in the ribs and rode towards them.

They were long in hearing him, indeed, it was only after he ceased to call after them that they turned around, perhaps having heard the sound of the hooves… perhaps not even having precisely heard them… but become somehow aware of… something. However it was, they turned, drew reign, awaited him.

They were three in number—one was an older man, one was a younger man, one was a woman. To be more exact, a girl. To be even more exact, the girl who had repulsed his assistance in the mob scene before the Hall of Court… the girl whom he had seen and who had fled from him in the woods between the fatal coming of the great rogue dragon and his capture by the outlaw Doghunters.

She had said something upon seeing him now and, obviously, recognizing him; something swift and low-voiced to her companions. And then for a long while, all four of them riding through the long, slow twilight over the empty plains, she said nothing, but slumped her chin into the blue cloak whose folds enveloped her.

The older man was a swart, stocky, grizzle-bearded fellow, his knees stuck out at angles from the sides of his thin gaunt horse. He wore a long cloak of the same blue as the girl, but, cast half aside, it revealed a garb of greasy buckskin beneath. Gold rings glittered in his hairy ears. His male companion was something else altogether—young, slender, upright and trim…
elegant
was the word which occurred to Jon-Joras. His tunic was Gentleman’s white, his trousers the elaborate embroidered affair worn on festivals by tribesmen, and his cloak—arranged with elaborate neatness so as to leave his arms free—was fastened across his chest with a silver chain and clasp. A bracelet of gold chased-work encircled a wrist held out as stiff and proud as if it bore a hawk.

At length the elder cleared his throat and spat. He scratched himself reflectively. “I’ve been thinking on what you said before, Henners,” he observed. “And I can’t see that I agree, no, not one bit. There is nothing at all wrong with the triolet.”

“Nonsense, Trond,” Henners said, vigorously. “It is archaic, contrived, artificial, jejeune—and anything else you like. It altogether lacks the simplicity and directness of the couplet, neither does it lend itself to amplified assonance and alliteration.”

Trond screwed his face up into a truly hideous squint, compounded with a frown. “But the couplet”—the last word exploded into an enormous eructation—“the couplet is so monotonous!”

And so they rode on, as the air turned blue and the sky went purple and the first tiny stars appeared, discussing different modes and meters of poetry; and finally the bright and dancing light of a fire shone before them. And another, and another. Voices haled them, figures rose and crowded around. The girl dismounted, someone took her horse, she vanished from Jon-Joras’s sight.

“Fellow poets,” said Henners, gesturing, “allow me to present our guest, one Jon-Joras by name, an outworlder and sometime semi-captive of those coarse persons, the Northern Tribe. I think we may be of some small assistance to him in the matter of getting him back to a state… and I think we will find him not ungenerous, hem, hem, in the matter of expenses. Well! Are we not to eat and drink before falling to the making of new verses and rhymes, the chief end of such portion of mankind as dare deem itself civilized?”

Invitations were at once shouted, the guest was assisted from his pony and led to a seat by the largest of the fires, where a pair of lambs were grilling on a spit over a bed of coals. Someone thrust a goblet into his hand, of some drink which managed to taste both sweet and acid at the same time; and strong, and smelling of honey.

“First verse!” a voice close to him called. Others took it up. “First verse! Guest! Outworlder! First verse!”

The realization that he was to compose, instant and impromptu, a short poem, found Jon-Joras with an empty mind. Empty, that is, of everything except the feeling that there was something odd about the lambs which were becoming supper. He held up his hand, the crowd became silent. He spoke:

“Three rode forth, and four returned

When supper grilled and fire burned.

A mystery they found, ere sleep:

Whence came lambs, when there’s no sheep!”

The briefest of quiets followed the recitation. Then it was swallowed up in a burst of laughter. Someone pounded him on the back. Someone poured more drink into his golden goblet. And someone on the other side of the fire, whose face he could not distinguish, started a reply.

“Such miracles you find, our guest,

Along with drink and food and rest.

The truth we tell, although it grieves:

The simple fact is—we are thieves!”

Poets there were on MM
beta,
though mostly employing verse forms so involved and elaborate as to make the triolet seem simpler than the couplet. And there were thieves there, too, although even the apprentice ones would scarcely bother with anything as small as a lamb. Poetic thieves, however, or thieving poets—this was something new to Jon-Joras. He suspected it might be something new (or, at any rate, something different) to students of societal set-ups throughout all the teeming galaxy.

And so, there by the leaping flames, he leaned and he listened—amused, amazed, disapproving, entranced—while Henners recited (in couplets and quatrains) his exploits in removing the jewels and gold and silver plate of His Serene Supremacy the Chairman of the Board of Syndics of Drogue, while the latter sat at meat in his high chamber.

With guests.

He was mildly annoyed at the distraction of having a voice break in on the recitation… at first. But when the words sank in, he forgot Henners and all his works.

“She’s a mean one, that baggage… isn’t she?”

Jon-Joras, turning his head and seeing Trond, face reddened by the fire light, had somehow no doubt who was meant by “she.”

“Who
is
she?” he asked, half-whispering. Trond jerked his head to the left, moved off, and Jon-Joras followed him. Henner’s voice was still audible when they stopped at last, but the words could no longer be made out. A fat and gibbous moon rode the cloud-flecked skies and afforded plenty of light to the park-like glade where the thieves’ jungle was set up.

“Who is she?” Trond repeated the. question, sat himself on a moss-covered tree trunk lying where it had fallen in some long-ago storm. He did not answer the question, said, instead, “She claims you’re following her…”

Speechless indignation followed by indignant speech. She claimed that he was following
her?
If the truth was anything at all like that, it was strictly the other way around. He told the older man of finding her in the mob scene in Peramis when the Doghunter had been convicted of killing the Gentleman, of his own attempt to help her and how it had been repulsed—almost rabidly.

“That could have been an accident, our meeting the first time. She couldn’t have known I was going to be there, I certainly didn’t know she was going to be there. And as for the second time—” Abruptly, he stopped. Did Trond or any of his fellows know about the Kar-chee castle and what was being done there? And, assuming that he and they didn’t, did Jon-Joras want them to? Quick reflection decided him that he didn’t. He went on, a bit lamely, “—and the second time I was just lost in the woods, I’d gotten separated from the people I was with, and I was picked up by some Doghunters.

“I had no notion she’d be wandering in the same woods. And this last time, I—”

“You got lost,” said Trond, nodding, expressionlessly. “Again.”

The night was warm, but the young man felt his face go warm. “It may sound like an unlikely coincidence,” he said, defensively, “but you have to remember that I’m an outworlder… a stranger… And besides—how could I have known that she—and you—would be riding along at just that time.”

Trond grunted. He produced an oddly-shaped piece of wood, thrust it into a pouch and did something to it, blew on the end of a stick he’d brought with him from the fire, and, when it glowed red, thrust the device into his mouth and touched it with the ember end. Odd little noises, then a cloud of smoke… and another… the acrid odor made Jon-Joras cough a bit—and then he remembered. Tobacco! Its use had not followed mankind outward to the stars, and even here on its native world it was supposed to be all but extinct. Where had Trond gotten the ancient herb? For surely the Poets cultivated no crops! Most likely he had stolen it.

“Well,” said Trond, on a prolonged note, with a puff, “I’m just telling you what she says. I could think of a lot of ways it might be true… if I was minded to… but I’m not. Why not? Because. Like I say. She’s a mean one, that baggage. As the triolet says—”

But Jon-Joras did not at that moment want to know what the triolet said. He grasped Trond’s knee, and repeated, “Who is she?
Who?‘

Trond puffed at his pipe a moment more. “Her name,” he said, “is Lora.”

Lora. “No… It doesn’t mean a thing to—”

“Maybe her father’s name might mean a thing to you.”

“Her father?”

Trond nodded. His pipe made a gurgling sound. “Yes. Tall, thin,
ukh
-looking man. Name of Hue.”

Away in the night Henner’s voice ceased. There were cheers and applause. Jon-Joras, feeling stunned, feeling stupid, said, “But
she
hates me. Her father doesn’t hate me.”

Trond made a noise which might have been a grunt or a chuckle. “Don’t fool yourself. Of course he hates you. You’re an outworlder, aren’t you? Well, figure it out. According to him, according to her, if you—all of you—didn’t come here to hunt, the whole system would collapse. It doesn’t pay for itself, that’s for sure. Not hate you? He’s just older, has more control over his feelings, that’s all.”

In his mind’s eye Jon-Joras saw once again that grim, gaunt figure, preternaturally rigid, stalking the halls and walls and ramparts of the great black stronghold of the cold-blooded, castle-keeping Kar-chee; heard the screams of the rogue dragon in the pit, trained by torment—dragons: Hue’s enemy: prepared to fall upon Hue’s other enemy. Once again he saw the figure of the dummy that was no dummy, trussed and tied, then tossed and toothed and torn to bleeding fragments; heard the outlaw’s outraged cry, “That… is what happens to
traitors!”

Hue hated him? Yes… it was clear enough now that he must. And what must he think of him now? What, but that he himself, Jon-Joras, freed by the nomad raiders, taking with him the castle’s secret, was himself a traitor? And Jon-Joras imagined himself bound and fastened in the dragon-pit, watching and waiting and hearing and smelling the maddened creature come trampling down the pounded ground towards him…

Nothing could save him from that, were Hue to take hold of him again. He felt his chin tremble and his skin grow cold and wet. If the daughter did not believe that he was accidentally present in the forest along the way to the outlaws’ castle, would the father? Not likely.

“They mustn’t take me,” he muttered, his voice uneven. “Not again. Not again.”

Trond pursed his wide mouth, waved his hand. “Not much danger of that,” he said. “You’re worth more to us by getting you back to one of the states. Provided, of course,” he raised his eyebrows, “provided, of course, you meant what you said. About our, uh, expenses…?”

Jon-Joras assured him that, of course, he meant it. “Jetro Yi, the Hunt Company representative, has an ample fund, sufficient to repay you. Generously. Generously!”

The other man rose, stretched. “That’s all right, then,” he said, yawning. “We’ll get you back, all right. Oh—” A sudden thought seemed to occur to him. He put a hand on Jon-Joras’s shoulder, leaned so close that the reek of his tobacco was strong in the cool night air.

“You know one of ours, by the name of Thorm? Kind of a bandy-legged fellow with bulging blue eyes and his verses don’t scan? No? Well… Anyway… Watch out for him. Kind of carefully. Let’s be getting back to the fire, it’s growing cold.”

The moon continued to wander up the sky and a light mist was settling in the glade. The effect was luminous and ghostly.

“Thorm,” Jon-Joras repeated. “Why should I? I don’t know him at all. Does he know me?”

Trond stopped to rap his pipe against the boll of a tree. “No,” he said. “But he knows Lora.”

Jon-Joras recognized Thorm at once when, as soon as they got back to the fire, the man stepped forward, gave him an ugly look, spat on the ground, then stooped, dug up the clot of earth with the spittle on it, and flung it into his face.