The Dragon Book (58 page)

But Anlut was not like them; as the shaman had first said, probably he could have survived without any help or teaching at all.

As he ran in pursuit of the dragon, his Fate, Anlut’s thought was only of the route he must follow, which
intuitively
now he knew, and his consideration only of the most immediate issues—such as when to take out a strip of dried seal-meat and chew it. His
remembering
was a sort of void, cold and iron and misty, like the landscape all about. It did not offend or trouble him, how mankind had behaved towards him, neither their bleak care nor their dislike. To him, they were ghostly things. Even Kulvok had been like that, though he had seemed more significant than the others. But, Kulvok, to Anlut, was less a mortal man than a kind of spiritual time-telling device. And on that night when the lights of the Northland began to weave again, Anlut had heard a soundless chime, like the clash of two slender stars striking one on another. The moment had arrived. Next, Kulvok had proclaimed it. And so the next stage of life started, vital, irresistible, and expulsive as birth.

New-born at last then, out here Anlut had begun to live and to become.

Always alone among others, now he was alone in the vast, cold world. Where men made walls and lamps against that world, Anlut required no shelter and took all the light he needed from the low sun or the moon and stars. Even when the clouds blotted them up or the mists closed round, Anlut needed nothing else. When thin ice shifted suddenly beneath him, he only leapt free of it with an agility not common to men. One sunrise, sleeping his minutes on the ground, he woke to find the ice-sheet had moved and transposed him. He had slipped twice his height down into a funnel in the ice. But he merely put his hands and feet on the sides of it and hauled himself rapidly up and out. Unhelped, no man
could
have done this. Any other man must have died. Anlut grasped as much, and completely and unarrogantly knew his physical superiority. He had not been afraid or puzzled.

Perhaps nothing
could
stop him.

In his mind, the dragon waited at all times, maybe even when he slept, though he did not exactly dream of it, let alone
think
of,
consider
, or
remember
it.

Ulkioket, given him from the very start as his
reason
for existing, had grown right into Anlut and was now welded among the hero’s icy bones and cool, peculiar blood. He was a
part
of Anlut’s brain, not an image or aspiration there. He was not even a goal. Your Fate could hardly be a goal, after all. It was instead only a destination. Like the actual east to which Anlut ran, in order to meet it.

MONTHS of the winter passed, all one timeless era. And then the spoor appeared, there on the white earth, the engraved marks of the footfall: Ulkioket. They
were
beautiful. To Kulvok, once, they had been. And to the hero, always. In shape, they were like the long and broad-bladed leaves that stood out stiffly on certain shrubs in summer. The thorns of claws spread from them, some of them more sharply or deeply signed than others. But this varied. No injury had caused the unevenness, only different sorts of ice or snow underfoot. They were, however, much larger than any leaves. Each footfall was some three feet in length, about half that length across. Like a lamp-flame from a stone lamp.

The originator had never been seen close to. From the prints, you could hazard the size of him.

If he did not brush the roof of the sky with his crest, nevertheless his back must rise at least twenty or twenty-five feet into the air, his neck and head rather higher.

His winding tail, often held clear of the earth, still left its own track in places, frequently then wiping out areas of the other signs. The spoor of the dragon’s tail was like the narrow passage of a cruel storm wind, that kept low, attracted to some element in the ground-ice, scratching and tearing to come at it.

Anlut, having found the first definite signs, stayed there a while, examining them. Like Kulvok, and yet not like, Anlut put his bare hand into a pad-mark.

To Anlut, the dragon-cold felt like lightning—galvanic—yet it did not burn. Gazing at his palm and fingers, Anlut noted no change. But for an hour after, his skin there sang and prickled. As he had been told the chilled, numbed skin of a man did, held out to the warmth of fire.

That evening, Anlut went by a frozen jumble like a fall en hill. It had been a village, and the dragon had seen to it.

TWO sunpasses later, the hero saw his quarry.

It was a cloudless night, stars like splashes of steel and silver flung out across it, so that even without any moon as yet, to Anlut the world seemed bright as a morning at winter’s end.

He had climbed to the top of a cliff, and below lay the ice-sheet of the tundra. It too looked made of silver and steel.

And on it there walked a black-blueness that was also a glowing, molten light, and it brushed the roof of the sky with its crest …

Despite everything, despite having glimpsed the dragon before more than once from far away, despite its constant fateful residence in his own life, body, and brain, Anlut ceased to breathe. He stood on the cliff-top, motionless, and, for an instant, barely conscious.

Just as it had years ago for the shaman, in that instant too Ulkioket half turned his head.

This was like the flirtatious gesture of some girl, something never offered to Anlut, this partial looking over a shoulder—

The hero saw the human eye of Ulkioket, black in its star-sparkling white, and the slanted lids holding it. Anlut blinked his own unhuman green-blue eyes. He let go his breath and drew in another. No smoke came from his mouth as it would have had he been human; he was not warm enough to cause it.

On the cliff, he watched until the dragon turned away and walked on over the tundra.

Then he hurried down the cliff-face and began again his striding run, going much faster now, following the interrupted pattern of the pad-marks and the storm mark of the tail.

Now he seldom glanced to either side. He stared ahead after Ulkioket.

He was midnight blue, the dragon, and the starlight streamed over him like rushes of summer water. The plain went on and on, and for some hours Anlut had a perfect view. Never before had he been afraid, but now the hero was. He was afraid he might lose sight of Ulkioket around some twist of the land, might lose him even. Faster and faster Anlut ran, till even he breathed swiftly, and in his own ears he heard the drum of his heart—
Umb-umber umber umber
—

A memory came while he was running, when the full moon rose, from nowhere, moon and memory together. The memory was of being in the hot womb of his mother and how he hammered there and shouted, not knowing what he did. Probably, he thought, he was demanding to be born.

Then the cold breath blew. The cold was not horrible. The cold did not frighten.

After the remembering, came thought. The thought suggested that he had cried to and for the cold, it was the cold ness which
let
him be born, and otherwise, without it, he might have died, for the woman who carried him could not have borne him successfully, she was not strong enough. Both she and he would have perished. But instead the ice came. And he lived though she did not.

After remembering and thought, he considered.

He considered the long, sharp knife and the spear and his own great strength. His heroism and destiny.

Exactly then, the twist appeared in the landscape, mountains of snow and ice, and the dragon moved around them. Was gone.

THE shadow fell all along the ice. It was not cast by the curve of the mountain around which Anlut had just sped. The moon was lower now. It flamed like a pale, ancient ruby, just behind the gigantic crest of the dragon, which sat there almost wolf-like, its front legs stretched out, head raised, regarding him from its human eyes. Now those eyes looked very large indeed. And the clawed, scaled forefeet rested on the shadow and the ice not thirty feet away.

Anlut could easily have slid one of his hands between any two of the steely claws.

It was clear that it beheld him. It
regarded
him.

And he regarded it. Him.

Ulkioket. Winter. Enemy.

The hero sensed that his adversary watched, thought, considered. Perhaps even he remembered—other men he had glimpsed in the moments of slaughtering them.

Anlut waited.

But Ulkioket waited too. Had even sat there, it seem ed, to wait until Anlut might catch up to him.

Anlut raised the spear and the long knife, to show Ulkioket why he had come.

And then Anlut sang, in his lean, metallic voice, one of the old songs of the tribes, about the winter and man’s constant war with it. He did this also to demonstrate, should the ice dragon be in any doubt, why he was here. And to honour the dragon.

The song continued some while. The dragon sat, seeming to attend.

Under all, a piping, a faint drum, the wind melodiously provided accompaniment.

When Anlut completed the song, the stars were more sparse, and the moon was just a copper smudge. The colossal shadow had spread across everything. Ulkioket reflected a glittering black, and Anlut himself a type of twilight colour.