Dark Lord of Derkholm (24 page)

“Sprained, are they, or what?” Scales was saying to Don. “Move them, yellow cat-bird. Come on!”

Don miserably flopped his wings about. “They
stood
on them!”

“More fool you, for letting them,” Scales boomed. “Where are your instincts? First rule for fledglings is: Get airborne at the first sign of trouble. Didn't anyone teach you that?”

“No, sir,” said Don.

“Comes of being brought up by ignorant humans, I suppose,” Scales growled. “Remember it in future. You, too, little black one.”

Kit glowered. “Yes. Sir. My name's Kit.”

“Just remember it,” Scales rumbled. “And you can be rude when you're my size, but not before.” Blade looked at Kit unbelievingly. Kit was
not
going to be as big as Scales! Surely? “No, but he'll be half as big again as he is now before he's through,” Scales remarked. “It's in the size of his bones. You'll be that big, too, yellow one. Now get those wings moving. Nothing's broken. They're only bruised.”

Don cautiously opened his wings. His neck arched in pain. He screeched.

“Flap them. Keep fanning them,” Scales ordered unfeelingly. Don gave him a piteous look. “To get the blood moving,” Scales explained impatiently. “I can't help you unless you help yourself.”

Don ground his beak sideways with a wretched, cracking sound and managed to flap his wings, slowly, dolorously. Scales put his vast head on one side and watched. Don's wings began to move faster and then more freely until, in a second or so, they were truly fanning. “They're all right now! What did you do?” he said.

“Can't explain,” rumbled Scales. “Encouraged nature, I suppose. Keep fanning while I see to the other one.”

Blade had been worrying, at the back of his mind, at the way they had all left Shona lying beside that horrible crunched corpse. But when they went over there, there was no corpse. He wondered if Scales had eaten it in a spare moment. He felt rather sick.

“Don't touch me!” Shona cried out as they all came near.

“Sit up! Look at me!” Scales thundered.

Shona sat up as if the ground had burned her and stared upward, cringingly, into the dragon's huge eyes. After a moment or so her body straightened and seemed to relax at the same time. “Oh, that's better!” she said. “Everything seems—a long time ago, somehow.”

“Best I could do,” Scales rumbled. He sounded slightly apologetic. “Try to keep it long ago.”

“I
will!
” Shona said devoutly. “Blade, can you fetch me my spare clothes? I'm so bruised—no, I'm not! How did that happen? I'll get my clothes. You lot go and round up the animals.”

Blade found himself beaming with relief. Shona was back to normal, and her old bossy self.

I
T TOOK MOST OF AN HOUR
to round up the horses. Pretty, naturally, gave more trouble than the rest put together. Then they had to find the Friendly Cows, who really needed to be milked—but no one had time or energy—and then fetch back the dogs—who had in a bewildered way decided they ought to take off into the wild as a pack—and finally to assemble the geese, who refused utterly to get back in their hamper; they had decided it was dangerous in there. Nobody bothered to look for the carnivorous sheep.

“I'm glad to see the back of them, frankly,” Shona said, energetically buckling baggage onto horses. “I've always thought they were one of Dad's failures.”

“Dad may be upset all the same,” Don said, humping his shoulders. His wings still hurt.

“Let him be,” said Shona. “There. All ready to go at last.”

Everybody looked at Scales. He was lying with his muzzle on his front feet, asleep. Two peaceful wisps of smoke curled from his nostrils. He was, Blade thought, very old even for a dragon, and perhaps all this activity had been too much for him. Blade wished he could go to sleep, too. He was so tired. Instead, he mounted Nancy Cobber and rode as near to Scales as Nancy would go. He gave a long-distance cough. Scales opened one vast green-gold eye. “Ready to leave?”

“Yes, sir,” said Blade.

“Aren't we respectful all of a sudden!” Scales rumbled. He rose up. Nancy Cobber backed off and tried to rear until Blade rode her hastily out of the way. “Black Kit-bird!”

“Yes?” said Kit. He was not going to call Scales sir again even if Scales ate him for it.

“Go and open the camp entrance as soon as I get the murderers moving,” Scales ordered.

Sullenly Kit prowled off and sat himself in front of the place where the dome opened. Scales went to the other side of the dome. It suddenly seemed a tiny, flimsy thing beside him. All the soldiers inside crowded down to Kit's end, away from Scales.

“You know, I think we've lost a few,” Don said to Shona. “It was fuller than that last night.”

“Too bad!” said Shona.

Scales thrust his snout at the dome where it met the ground. He worried at it for a moment and then pushed his head and great forequarters underneath it and inside, so that the dome wobbled above his spiny back like a soap bubble. “UP, SCUM! OUT OF THE DOOR! QUICK MARCH!” Smoke came billowing from his mouth with each order.

What with Scales inside and the camp filling with smoke, the soldiers had little choice. Coughing and staggering, they crowded toward the entrance as Kit opened it, and streamed outside in a great untidy gaggle. Scales took his head out from inside and trampled clean across the dome, bellowing, “FORM LINES, THERE! MARCH! LEFT-RIGHT, LEFT-RIGHT!” The last soldiers squirted out in front of him. Kit leaped aside, and Scales rumbled at him, “Keep them in a line your side. MARCH, YOU SCUM!” he howled to the soldiers. “LEFT-RIGHT, LEFT-RIGHT!”

It was wonderful how quick and straight and far those men could march, Blade thought as he followed surrounded by dogs and cows, if a huge dragon came after them and made them do it. They streamed across fields, moorlands, an arid corner of the wastelands, and then across further moors, all that morning. The geese, who liked to see humans being bullied, kept up beside Scales, alternately flying and waddling. Don was commanded to keep the line straight on the other side from Kit's. Blade wearily drove cows. He was utterly and hugely relieved when, about midday, Scales bellowed, “HALT! SIT DOWN! REST STOP!” and came gliding back toward the cows. Blade was even more surprised that the soldiers not only sat down but stayed sitting.

“Better milk those cows,” Scales rumbled, stopping a tactful distance from the horses. “Give the pails to the cat-birds to give to the soldiers when you fill them.”

He certainly does give his orders! Blade thought, sliding down from Nancy. Shona dismounted from Beauty, protesting, “We haven't been bothering with lunch.”

“I know. They've been grumbling about it all morning,” Scales said. “They've worked up quite a grievance. Do you carry any food for them?”

“Not really,” Shona explained. “There's food in the camps, and we've been relying on that.”

“Have to make do with what we've got then,” said Scales. He settled down into a great green hump halfway between the cows and the soldiers and seemed to be dozing comfortably while Blade and Shona got busy milking and handing swirling white pailfuls to Kit and Don as they were ready.

“They don't like milk. They want beer,” Don reported.

“They get beer in camp this evening,” growled Scales.

There were no further protests, but when Kit alighted beside Blade, clanging down his empty pail and holding his talons out for the full one, he said, “I don't understand. We'd only got the four pails, hadn't we? And all four of them are in among the soldiers full of cheese. They're guzzling it in hunks.”

Blade gave a puzzled look toward the soldiers and saw one of Scales's great eyes closing in a wink. Kit was in time to see it, too. “Oh,” he said to Blade. “More encouraging nature.”

The milking was done at last. There was enough milk left for Shona and Blade, except that the milk in the bottom of Blade's pail was in the form of a small round cheese.

“You prefer that to milk, don't you?” Scales said when Blade looked at him. “I'll have one of those cows now.”

“But—” said Blade.

“If I eat it in front of the murderers,” Scales explained, “there'll be no arguing when I tell them what to do next.”

Scales did just that, with horrid rendings and mooings and much blood. To add to the effect, he tore off two large lumps and tossed them to Don and Kit. Both griffins were so savagely hungry by then that they ate the pieces ravenously. The soldiers went very quiet. But Blade counted the cows and found that they still had the same number. He rather thought Kit and Don might have been eating cheese.

“I don't propose to inquire,” said Shona. “But I didn't realize dragons could do this.”

“Mum said some of the old ones were quite good at magic,” Blade told her.

“And Scales
is
old,” Shona agreed. She sighed. “If I'd gone to Bardic College when I was supposed to, I'd probably have learned dragonlore by now. I might know all about Scales. He could have been a legend in his time for all I know.”

Legend or not, Scales got them across the moors to the camp long before nightfall that evening, and the following night, too. The next day they toiled briskly across much more broken terrain, filled with woods and small rivers, and arrived into camp rather later. The soldiers cheered. Inside the mist of the dome were the rows of barrels they had come to expect from the previous two nights.

“Thank goodness!” Shona said, sliding off Beauty. “We can
rest
while Blade does the avians.” Blade had been taking the geese around to all three tours, because that was the easiest way to do it.

“Not much rest tonight,” Kit said, groaning with weariness. “We've got the first Wild Hunts today.”

“Tonight? Really?” said Don. “Have we been going that long?”

“'Fraid so,” said Kit.

Blade looked at the row of geese. They looked up from eating something in the grass and dared him to put them in that hamper again. “I
can't,
” he said. “I'm too tired.”

“Nonsense!” boomed Scales.

“Let's eat, anyway,” Shona sighed.

They did that. Blade fell asleep over the last of his supper, despite rowdy noises from the soldiers around the beer barrels, and woke at sunset feeling much better. The geese, to his surprise, were sitting smugly in the hamper, waiting for him. They were not going to miss their chance to bully humans.

“All right,” Blade said to them. “I bet you don't dare bully three lots again.”

They made scathing noises. Easy-peasy.

Blade left as Kit was hauling himself off the ground and preparing to do the illusions for the Wild Hunts. When he returned astride his hamper of highly satisfied avians—they had sent three wizards racing up three different mountains faster than ever, and Blade had still not set eyes on a single Pilgrim—Kit was still trying to do illusions. He had given himself red eyes. He had transformed the Friendly Cows into great black horned things with ordinary eyes. Nothing would persuade the eyes of the cows to flame as Kit wanted. And the dogs kept shaking themselves irritably and losing their black coats and burning eyes in a shower of misty droplets. None of the horses would show the slightest change. Kit was looking a bit wild over it all.

“You look tired, Blade. You don't need to come,” Shona said kindly.

“But I
want
to!” Blade insisted. He was dying to pretend to be the Dark Lord.

“Oh,
curses!
” shrieked Kit as the dogs all shook themselves normal again.

Scales was lying up against the dome of the camp, as he had taken to doing, to make sure the soldiers behaved themselves. He was watching Kit's efforts as sarcastically as the geese were. “If I may make a suggestion?” he boomed.

“What?” snapped Kit.

“These game-playing Pilgrims are going to see very little in the dark,” Scales pointed out. “You are black. You propose to turn the yellow cat-bird black, and you have a winged horse that is black. The other flying horse, though tiny, has wings that look like the ribs of a skeleton. All you really need to do is make the rider of the black horse black—”

“That's me,” Shona put in.

“—then you put yourselves in the air in front and bring the dogs along as they are to make a noise,” Scales continued. “I assure you this will be enough. The cows are far too slow to keep up.”

“I suppose that's true,” Kit admitted.

“But what about
me?
” said Blade.

“I require you to stay here,” said Scales.

Somehow there was no arguing with that. Blade had to watch, bitterly disappointed and furious with Shona for hogging the post of Dark Lord, while two black griffins with fiery eyes—Kit did not think Scales should have things all his own way—and a horned rider mounted on a winged horse all flew slowly away northward accompanied by a posse of excited dogs and one wildly skittish flying foal. As soon as Kit was a mile or so away, the black horned monsters he had left in the camp melted into the Friendly Cows again.