The Dragon and the George (15 page)

"And before that you were a baron?"

"Well…" Jim hesitated.

"I thought so!" she said, triumphantly. "Part of the spell keeps you from telling who you really were. I mean, undoubtedly you were the Baron of Riveroak, but you were probably a lot more than that. A hero of some kind, probably."

"Well, no," said Jim.

"How would you know? This is exciting. Oh, my name's Danielle. I'm the daughter of Giles o' the Wold; except that I'm on my own, now."

"Giles o' the Wold?" Brian echoed. "He's that outlaw, isn't he?"

"He is now!" she flashed, turning on him. "He was a gentleman of rank once, though his true name I will tell to none."

Aragh growled.

"No offense," said Brian with surprising mildness. "I thought Giles o' the Wold, though, was of the King's Forest, up beyond Brantley Moor?"

"So he is," she said. "And there he and his men are, still. But, as I say, I now live apart from him."

"Ah," said Brian.

"Ah, yourself!" she said. "Why should I spend my days with a bunch of men either old enough to be my father, and women just as old, or clodpated young bumpkins who turn red and stammer when they speak to me? My father's daughter deserves better than that!"

"Well, well," said Brian.

"And again, well!" She looked from Brian to Jim and her voice softened. "I feel no need to crave pardon, Sir James, but it's only fair to say I'd not have shot at you if I'd known you and this knight to be friends of Aragh."

"That's all right," said Jim.

"Quite all right," echoed Brian. "However, if you're through tickling the wolf, my lady o' the Wold, perhaps we three should be moving on. We want to get to Malvern Castle before the gate's locked for the night."

He reined his horse about in the direction they had all been heading originally and began to ride off. Jim, after a moment's hesitation, moved after him. A second later they were joined not only by Aragh, but by Danielle, her bow and quiver slung upon her shoulder.

"You're going to Malvern Castle?" she asked. "Why?"

"I must ask permission of my lady Geronde de Chaney to companion Sir James here in the rescue of his lady."

"His lady?" She turned on Jim. "You've got a lady? Who is she?"

"Angela… uh… de Farrel, of Trailercourt."

"Odd names you have overseas," commented Brian.

"What does she look like?" demanded Danielle.

Jim hesitated.

"She is fair," Brian put in, "according to Sir James."

"I'm fair," said Danielle. "Is she as fair as I am?"

"Well…" Jim stumbled. "Yes and no. I mean, you're different types…"

"Different types? What does that mean?"

"It's a little hard to explain," said Jim. "Let me think about it. I'll think of a better way to explain it after I've had a chance to mull it over."

"All right. You mull," said Danielle. "But I want to know. Meanwhile, I think I'll come along with the rest of you to Malvern Castle."

Brian opened his mouth. For a second he looked as if he would say something. But then he closed his mouth again.

They moved along together, Danielle refusing an offer from Brian to mount her behind him on his horse. She could, she stated, outrun the heavy white charger any day in the week. Certainly she could outwalk him.

Jim was more than a little baffled by Danielle. He had been prepared to take on in the way of Companions any who could be useful to him. When Brian had cropped up, he had wrestled a bit with the idea of the knight simply declaring himself in. Once he had accepted that idea, however, Aragh's joining them had seemed almost natural. But this girl—to be one of his Companions, to face the Loathly Tower and the Dark Powers and rescue Angie? In no way could he envision her being useful. Granted, she was good with a bow and arrow…

He lost himself in the mental puzzle of trying to reconcile all the unbelievable elements of this place he and Angie had fallen into. The dragons, the magician, the sandmirks (if he had seen them on film in a late, late movie he would have sneered at them), Aragh, and now this russet-haired goddess with a bow and arrow who talked like—he did not know what she talked like. Except that he was becoming more and more wary of finding himself in a conversation with her. She had a directness which literally scared him silly. What gave her the idea that she could ask any question she felt like?

Of course, he did not have to answer. But not answering simply made him look as if he were dodging something. The nub of the problem was that Jim had been very strictly trained not to ask embarrassing questions; and apparently Danielle had no inhibitions at all in that area.

The next time she asks me something I don't want to answer, he told himself, I'll simply tell her it's none of her business—

"Ridiculous!" he heard Brian saying to Aragh, "I tell you. From this angle we have to come in behind the castle, at the Little Lyn Stream, where the curtain wall is up on a rock and there's no way in, even if someone on the wall recognizes me."

"We come in facing the gate, I tell you!" snarled Aragh.

"Back!"

"Gate—"

"Look," said Jim hastily, waking once more to his role as peacemaker between these two. "Let me ask somebody local. All right?"

Peace at any price.

He turned aside from their line of march through the apparently unending wood, and searched about for a source of directions. It certainly could not be too hard to find someone. Granted, there seemed to be no other humans about. But in this world, everything seemed capable of speech—dragons, watchbeetles, wolves… An exception might be the flora. So far he had seen no evidence that trees, flowers or bushes could speak. But if he could only find an animal or insect…

However, annoyingly, just at the moment, there was nothing in sight. He wandered on, looking for anyone at all: a mouse, a bird… Suddenly he almost tripped over a badger, in appearance a twin to the one he had seen galumphing by while he and Brian were holding their positions at the command of Danielle.

"Hey, wait!" he cried.

It did not seem disposed to wait. Jim flipped himself into the air on his wings and thumped again to earth, this time facing the badger.

He had it backed up against a bush. It bared its teeth in true badger fashion. Badgers, Jim remembered a zoologist saying once at a rather drunken faculty party, would tangle with anybody. This one was obviously not about to spoil the general reputation of its kind, in spite of the fact that Jim-Gorbash outweighed it something like a hundred to one.

"Take it easy," said Jim. "I just want some information. We're headed toward Castle Malvern. Will this way bring us up behind it, or to its front?"

The badger hunched its shoulders and hissed at him.

"No, really," Jim persisted. "I'm just asking."

The badger snarled and made a lunge for Jim's left forefoot.

When he snatched the foot back, the badger turned with a speed that was surprising in a creature of its apparent clumsiness, slipped around the bush and disappeared. Jim was left staring at nothing.

He turned away to find Brian, Danielle and Aragh behind him, all in a row, staring at him.

"I just wanted to get some directions from someone who knew…" he began; but his voice died in his throat at the sight of their stares. They were looking at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

"Gorbash," said Aragh, at last, "were you trying to talk to that badger?"

"Why, yes," said Jim. "I just wanted to ask someone who knew the local area whether we would come out behind Castle Malvern, or in front of it."

"But you were talking to a
badger
!" said Danielle.

Brian cleared his throat.

"Sir James," he said, "did you think you recognized this particular badger as someone you knew who had also been ensorceled? Or is it that in your country badgers can talk?"

"Well, no—I mean, I didn't recognize this badger; and no, in my country badgers can't talk," said Jim. "But I thought…"

His voice failed. He had been about to cite as evidence his experience that dragons, watchbeetles and wolves could talk; but faced with those stares, he got the abrupt but certain feeling he had just managed to make a fool of himself.

"Mixed up in the head, that's what he is!" Aragh said, gruffly. "Not his fault!"

"Well," said Jim, defensively. "I talk, and I'm a dragon."

"Don't dragons talk where you come from, Sir James?" asked Danielle.

"We don't have dragons where I come from."

"Then what gave you the idea they didn't talk?" demanded Aragh. "Been overworking your brains, Gorbash, that's the trouble. Try not to think for a while."

"We have wolves where I come from"—Jim turned on him—"and they don't talk."

"Wolves don't talk? Gorbash, you're addled. How many wolves do you know?"

"I don't exactly know any. But I've seen them in… I mean, on…"

Jim realized immediately that the words "zoos" and "films" would mean as little to the three in front of him as "Social Security number" had meant to the knight, earlier. In whatever language he was speaking now, they would be nothing but meaningless noises.

"How about watchbeetles?" he demanded desperately. "When I talked to Carolinus, he poured some water on the ground and a watchbeetle came to the surface and spoke."

"Come, come, Sir James," said Brian. "Magic, of course. It had to be magic. Watchbeetles can't talk, any more than badgers can."

"Oh, well," said Jim feebly. He gave up. "Never mind. As Aragh says, maybe I've been thinking too much. Let's forget it and get going again."

They took up their route once more, and a sudden shower caught them unexpectedly. For a moment, as the raindrops pelted down hard about them, Jim looked around for shelter—then recognized that the three with him were completely ignoring the wetting. Hard on this came his own recognition that his own armored hide was scarcely conscious of the moisture; and he decided to ignore it also. After a bit, the rain ceased and the sun tried to come out.

It was now in a quarter of the western sky which caused Jim to guess at a time of about 5 p.m.—an hour Brian and Danielle would probably refer to as midway between none and compline, from the canonical hours commonly in use in the Catholic Middle Ages. Momentarily, Jim ran back over his memory to fix those hours in his mind. The earliest was "matins," at midnight. Then came "lauds," at first daylight—call it plus or minus 5 a.m., depending on the season of the year. Then "prime," at sunrise—call that 6 a.m. Then "terce," midmorning—say, 9 a.m. "Sext," at noon. "None" at midafternoon—3 p.m. "Vespers" at sunset—5 p.m. or later… Finally, "compline," before retiring; which would probably be no later than an hour or so after sunset, particularly if you were a monk and had to look forward to getting up at midnight.

He had reached this point in delving his memory, when Aragh abruptly put his nose up into the air.

"I smell smoke," he said.

Jim sniffed the breeze which was blowing from them, not toward them. His dragon's sense of smell was not so much inferior to the wolf's but that he could smell smoke himself, now that his attention had been called to it. If they could smell it when the wind was carrying the odor away from them, then whatever was burning must be merely a short distance in front of them.

Aragh broke into a trot, and Brian spurred his horse to keep up. Jim increased his pace and Danielle ran easily alongside him. They went a short distance, emerged from among the trees and stopped, to find themselves in a clearing, at one end of a double row of huts made of mud and wattle, with straw-thatched roofs. Several of these were still smoking. The short rain had fallen here, too, and the bare earth between and around the huts was darkened and, in trampled spots, muddied by the water. The trees and the thatches still dripped moisture and the air was soft and damp. On it, here, the smell of smoke was strong. It hung still, for the breeze had now stopped.

The village—if that was what it was—was silent, with no one to be seen moving about it. Except for the few huts that had caught fire—only to have their flames apparently put out by the shower—there was nothing at all happening. The only people were four or five who had evidently fallen asleep about the street or in the doorway of some hut or other. About a dozen feet in front of Jim, as he pushed past Brian and Aragh for a better look, was a half-grown girl in a robe of coarse brown cloth, lying on her side with her back to them and her black hair spread on the mud.

Jim stared. Had the people here been having some sort of celebration, at which they became so intoxicated that they did not stir to put out the fires which drunken accident had started on their meager dwellings? He took one step more toward the girl to wake her up and ask her—and at that moment some twelve or fifteen men on horseback, with steel caps, half-armor and drawn swords, rode out from between the last huts at the far end of the village and turned to face Jim and the others.

The scene before Jim seemed to jump abruptly, like a faulty movie film, from one frame to the next. All at once, he saw the village with a difference: the people lying about were not merely sleeping, they were dead—killed—and their slayers were at the other end of the village street. He took a third step forward, looked at the dead girl before him, and from this fresh angle saw her arms stretched out before her without hands. They had been cut off at the wrist.

The smell of smoke now seemed to fill his brain. He launched himself into the air, swooping forward and down upon the mounted men. He saw their swords up, catching the watery sunlight as he drove into them, but he felt no blows. Three of the horses went down under the impact of his body and he tossed two of their falling riders aside with his clawed forepaws, cutting the third man—the one most directly in front of him—almost in half with one snap of his jaws. On the ground now, Jim reared up, striking out with claws, teeth and wings at once.

The action around him was a blur. He saw an arrow sprout suddenly, half out of the metal breastplate of a rider; and some gleaming metal drove into the fray on his right. The point of Brian's lance carried one rider clear off his horse and into another rider, who also flew from his saddle. Then the lance was dropped, and Brian's sword was cutting right and left; while under him the clumsy white charger—abruptly transformed—reared, screaming, lashing with its front hooves and savaging with its teeth, to beat to the ground the lighter horses about it.