The Dragon and the George (12 page)

The wind drew closer. They could hear the sound of its passage, now loud in the near-distance. It breathed closer and closer to them, leaving a sighing and groaning of branches where it passed. It was loud now, loud enough so that they had to raise their voices above its sound to speak to one another. Then, suddenly, it was on them.

It blew directly into the clearing with an abrupt force that threatened for a second to push them off their feet. The fire shot up a long trail of sparks into the darkness and its flames guttered nearly to extinction, so that the gloom all around suddenly flooded in on them, and they were peppered in the face by a shower of dried twigs and dead leaves.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the wind was gone. The fire flamed up again and the darkness was pushed back once more. Without warning, there was silence.

The wind had gone.

Brian sighed softly within the open visor of his helmet.

"Stand to watch, Sir James," he said softly. "Now, it comes."

Jim stared at the knight.

"It comes—" he started to echo.

And then he heard it.

It was so small and distant at first, he thought it was only a singing in his eardrums. Then it grew ever so slightly in volume and he identified it for what it actually was: a continuous, high-pitched chittering—like the wind, now off at a distance, but gradually growing closer. He sensed something mindless about that cluttering, something that made the skin crawl on the back of his dragon-neck, instinctively.

This body reaction stirred Jim almost more than the sound itself had done. What could there be out in woods like this, at night, of which even a dragon would be afraid? He opened his mouth to ask Brian what was making the noise; and found the question stuck in his throat. An almost superstitious fear checked him. If he asked Brian, and Brian told him, then whatever was moving in on them would become undeniably real. As long as he still did not know, it could be that it could all turn out to be an illusion, a bad dream from which he would awaken to a sunlit morning.

But as they stood, the chittering grew slowly louder and closer—and there was no awakening from a nightmare.

"Sir Brian," he said, at last. "What is it?"

The knight's eyes, within the firelit gloom of his visor, burned strangely on Jim.

"You don't know? Sandmirks, Sir James."

The moment Brian spoke the identifying word, something in the very blood and bones of Gorbash passed knowledge on to the mind of Jim—and he knew without further asking what they looked like, those hunters out in the night, circling ever closer and closer to this campfire and the two of them who waited here.

In his mind's eye Jim saw them, something of a cross between a rat and a ferret in shape and the size of small dogs. Their eyes would shine red, reflecting the light of the flames when they came close enough, but their black, coarse-haired bodies would remain invisible in the darkness as they passed around and around the clearing, just beyond the reach of the firelight. And from their mouths would continue to come this same mindless cluttering that was like the claws of spiders running up and down Jim's spine and into his brain.

"What they do here," said Brian, "this far from the sea, only the devil that helped them knows. Their proper runs are the cold salt beaches. Little shore animals and the poor castaways who have the ill luck to wash ashore at night are their proper prey. Here is an enemy against which my sword and your claws, Sir James, will be small help."

"If they come close enough—"

"They will not, while the minds are in our bodies. These are craven creatures, whose weapon is madness."

"Madness?" Jim echoed. The word had slid along all his nerves like an icy knife.

"What else did you think their noise meant?" Brian said. "The story is that they're possessed of the souls of other animals who have died insane, or in great torment, and so they are full of the stuff of madness, which they pour out on the night air to infect the minds of such as you and I. I know not how it is with you, Sir James, but Saint Giles has always been a good friend to me and he did not advise me to gather this huge pile of firewood for nothing. It's my counsel that we turn to that good saint, and to God with all his angels, for none else can aid us, here."

The knight drew his sword, rested it point down on the earth before him, and taking the hilt of it in both his hands, bowed his head above it in prayer. Jim stood still, watching the armored man, the fire and the surrounding darkness, hearing the steadily growing sound of the chittering. He was not at all religious himself; and somehow, in this particular moment, something in him rebelled at the thought of turning, or even pretending to turn, to religion for help. On the other hand, he could not help envying Brian for being able to find such a backup available and waiting.

For, whatever the truth was about the souls of animals who had died insane or in torment, there was no denying the fact that some quality in the chittering went clear through the conscious, logical, upper part of Jim's mind into the old, primitive levels behind it, and plucked the chords of atavistic fears he had not known he possessed. Deep within him, from the very first moment in which he recognized the chittering as something more than a singing in his ears, was the impulse to turn and run from it. To run and run, until either he could hear it no more, or his heart would burst from the effort of running.

In the end, that must be what all victims of the sandmirks did—run until they could run no more. And then, at last, with their prey exhausted and helpless, the black, fiery-eyed, humping shapes would close in, chittering, to kill and feed. While his conscious mind still worked, Jim recognized the fact that if he ran, he was lost. Like Brian he must stand here and fight back against the noise that was gnawing away at his sanity.

He could not bring himself to follow Brian's example; but there had to be other things he could do to set up a defense against the calling of the sandmirks. The multiplication tables?

He tried them. For a while, he was able to concentrate on them; and he congratulated himself on finding a weapon. But after he had run through all those that he knew readily and had started again on them, he found that the second time through they did not shut out the chittering as well as they had the first time. The third time he went through them, they were hardly any help at all, not much more than meaningless sounds muttered under the breath.

He searched his mind as best he could under the effect of the sandmirk voices—which were now clearly circling the camp at a distance of no more than fifty yards away or so—for something stronger than the multiplication tables with which to oppose them. In desperation, he began to recite the argument of his doctorate thesis on the changes in social custom deriving from the rise of the cities in France during the Hundred Years' War. Night after weary night, after all other work had been done, he had sat in the single light of his desk lamp, hammering out that thesis. If there was protective magic in anything he knew, it would be in that.

"…
Examination of the direct effects of the English military incursion into western France in the two decades immediately following the thirteen-fifties," he
muttered,
"show a remarkable process of change at work unrecognized by the very people caught up in it. Particularly the port of Bordeaux.
.."

Suddenly, to his joy, he realized it was working. All those midnight hours of effort he had put into the thesis had created a piece of mental machinery with a momentum that was too powerful for the cluttering of the sandmirks to clog and stop. As long as he could keep the words of it running through his head, he could hold them off. It was as if the chittering was blocked now by a barrier that allowed only the harmless noise of it wash over the barrier's top. The thesis had been two hundred and twenty double-spaced pages of typescript when finished. He would not reach the end of his material too soon, as he had with the multiplication tables. He glanced across the fire at Brian, and found the other still praying. Neither one of them dared take time off to speak with each other, but Jim tried to signal with his eyes that he was holding his own and he thought that Brian understood and returned a like message.

The sandmirks were close now—just outside the circle of firelight; and the sound of their voices was so shrill and encompassing that Jim could hardly hear the sound of his own voice in his ears. Nonetheless, he and Brian were holding their own and the predators in the darkness would not dare attack while their prey still had the will and the strength to defend themselves. As Jim watched, Brian reached down to throw a couple more of the dead branches on the fire.

Flames spurted up on the new fuel; and for a second, straining his eyes, Jim thought he had a glimpse of shadowy shapes slipping back out of sight into the further darkness. He and Brian continued their watch, and their own private litanies.

The night wore on.

The fire blazed. The sandmirks continued to circle, never stopping for one moment their invitation to terror. Croaking, with voices gone hoarse from steady, long use, Jim and the knight faced each other above the fire. Sir Brian swayed a little with weariness; and Jim felt himself also growing light-headed with exhaustion. The dark continued unbroken around them. The raw, damp scent of dawn was in the air, but daybreak was yet some time off.

And now, for the first time since he had begun to recite his thesis, Jim felt the pressure of the sandmirk voices beginning to crumble away the barrier he had erected against them. His exhausted memory fumbled, lost its place on the remembered page it was quoting, and found it again. But in that second of weakness the effect of the chittering had gained ground. It pierced through the words Jim painfully uttered; and its power was growing steadily.

Jim became conscious that Brian had stopped speaking. Jim also stopped and they stared at each other across the fire while the sound of the chittering soared in volume all around them, lifting triumphantly into the night.

The knight reversed his sword, picking it up to hold blade upward in both hands.

"In God's name," said Brian, in such a torn and ragged voice that Jim could hardly understand him, "let's go to them, while we still have the strength to do so."

Jim nodded. In the final accounting, to charge death was preferable to fleeing from it in sick fear. He stepped around the fire to stand beside Brian.

"Now!" said the knight in his husk of a voice, raising his sword overhead—

But before they could charge the almost invisible foe that encircled them, a scream almost worse than the chittering split the darkness to their right. At once, the sound that had driven them to the edge of madness ceased utterly, to be followed by the noise of many small bodies crashing away in flight through the woods.

Another scream sounded, this time straight ahead and farther out. A moment of waiting followed, during which the sounds of flight had all but died in the distance; and then came a third scream, farther off yet.

"By Saint Giles!" whispered the knight in the stillness. "Something's killing them…"

He had hardly finished before a fourth scream came, this time a long distance off. After that, utter silence.

Numbly, Brian moved to build up the fire. It crackled, blazed afresh and the shadows drew back a long distance. Jim glanced upward.

"Look," he said. "I think…"

Brian looked. An edge of cloud was pulling back from a few stars that were still visible; and the sky behind the stars was paling.

"Yes. Dawn," said Brian.

They stood watching as the sky turned toward light and the remaining stars faded to invisibility.

"But what was it that came to our rescue?" the knight asked.

Jim shook his head.

"I don't know," he said, hoarsely. "I can't guess what—"

He broke off.

Something had moved—a blacker black within the darkness of the still-deep shadows beyond the firelight. It moved again and came forward slowly, stepping into the light. A four-legged shape as large as a small pony, green-eyed, with long narrow muzzle, half-parted to show white, gleaming teeth and a tongue as red as the fire flames.

It was a wolf. A wolf double the size of the largest wolf Jim had ever seen in a zoo or on film. The green eyes went past the knight and the fire to burn savagely upon Jim.

"So it's you," a deep, harsh voice from the scimitar-armed jaws said. "Not that it makes all that difference. But I thought as much."

The mind can take only so much before reaction sets in. With all Jim had been through since he had ended up in this world, and particularly after the ordeal he had just gone through as the prey of the sandmirks, he should not have been struck numb by the fact that now it was a wolf who could talk like a man. But he was.

He sat down on his haunches with a thump. If he had been in his regular human body, he probably would have collapsed on the ground. But the effect was the same. He struggled to find his voice while the monster wolf walked forward to the fire.

"Who—who're you?" he managed at last.

"What's the matter, Gorbash?" snarled the wolf. "Sandmirks got your memory? I've only known you for twenty years! Besides, there's few living who'd mistake Aragh for any other English wolf!"

"You're who—Aragh?" croaked Brian.

The wolf glanced at him.

"I am. And who are you, man?"

"Sir Brian Neville-Smythe."

"Never heard of you," growled the wolf.

"My house," said Sir Brian stiffly, "is a cadet branch of the Nevilles. Our land runs beyond Wyven-stock to the Lea River on the north."

"None of my people up there," grated Aragh. "What're you doing down here in my forest?"

"Passing through on our way to Malvern, Sir wolf."

"Call me Aragh when you talk to me, man."

"Then address me as Sir Brian, Sir wolf!"

Aragh's upper lip began to curl back from his gleaming teeth.

"Wait—" said Jim, hastily.

Aragh turned to him, lip uncurling slightly.