The Dragon and the George (24 page)

Perhaps, the thought came to him much later, the others might have noticed this change in him and would have worked to reverse it, if it had not happened that, just at that time, as soon as he was well enough to participate, he was drawn into their discussion about what should be done next.

"…The decision," said Brian firmly at length, "must rest with you, Sir James. Geronde, he lent us his aid to get you free from Sir Hugh, and I'm in his debt for that. If he wishes to go first to the rescue of his lady—and Lord how can I object to that, seeing he's helped me to recover mine—I must go. You know that, milady."

"Of course I do," Geronde said, quickly.

They were all—except Smrgol, who had flown back on business of his own to the dragon cave—sitting at the high table of the castle hall after dinner and Jim was slaking an appetite for wine that had greatly recovered. Geronde was seated on the other side of Brian from Jim, and she leaned around the knight now to look directly into the dragon's eyes.

"I'm as much in debt to Sir James as you are, Brian," she said, "and bound like you to honor his decision. But, Sir James, I only want you to consider the advantages of moving against Hugh de Bois at just this time."

"Advantages for you, perhaps," Aragh growled at her. The wolf was always uncomfortable inside any building, and this made him even more bad-tempered than he was ordinarily. "I've no use for a castle. Nor should you, Gorbash!"

"But you wish an end to Sir Hugh as much as we," Geronde said to him. "You should want to go after him now, just as we do."

"I'll kill him when I find him; I won't hunt him. I hunt for food—not, like you humans, for anything cold or warm, wet or dry, that takes your fancy," snarled Aragh. "And Gorbash is like me, not like you."

"Gorbash may well be like you," Geronde retorted. "Sir James is not. And Sir James will be back in his own proper body one of these days. When that day comes, he may have need for a castle. Under law, I cannot acquire Sir Hugh's land and castle as long as there's doubt whether my father lives or not; and Malvern Castle and lands will go to Sir Brian as my husband, on our marriage, in any case. Meanwhile, once Sir Hugh is taken care of, we'll need a reliable neighbor; and the Bois de Malencontri is not an ill estate, even for a"—she glanced briefly down the length of the high table at Danielle—"person who may be of considerable degree."

"I say again, castles and lands are nothing to me," snarled Aragh. "What good are cold stone and dry earth? And I also say again they should be nothing to you, Gorbash. If Smrgol were here, he'd tell you that, too. In any case, I've been with you to guard your back and stand with you against the Dark Powers, not to help you gain human toys. You start lusting after things like that, Gorbash, and we go different ways!"

He rose to all four feet, turned and trotted from the hall, the castle people moving out of his way as he came close to them.

"Indeed," Dafydd agreed, when the wolf was gone, "and he could be right at that. Defending yourself is one thing, going to seek the killing is quite another, no matter how good the reason, look you."

"Don't listen to them, Sir James," said Danielle. "You don't need them, anyway. If you don't take that castle, somebody else will. Isn't that right, Father?"

"Since there's pay in it, count on me and my lads," Giles said to Lady Geronde. He turned to Danielle. "But it's business—business only—that takes us there. Beyond that, leave me out of this."

"I've promised you and your band half of the wealth Castle Malencontri contains," Geronde assured him. "You know it should be worth your while. Sir Hugh has been robbing his lesser neighbors for years."

"And I've agreed," said Giles. "It's not me you need consent from. It's Sir James."

Jim started to shrug before he remembered his dragon-body was not equipped to do so. Carolinus had told him that Angie would not be in discomfort while she was waiting for him to rescue her. A few more days, he thought now, out of his new inner bleakness—even an added week or two—should make little difference. Besides, just in case Carolinus couldn't get the two of them sent back to where they belonged, a castle and lands would not be a bad thing for them to own. The need for food and shelter—good food and comfortable shelter—was as much a reality here in this world as pain itself. And realities were not to be ignored.

"Why not?" he said. "All right, I'm in favor of moving on Hugh de Bois de Malencontri and his property now."

The moment he said it, a strange sort of ripple seemed to run through the air in the hall, something like the momentary shimmer of a heat wave, and the bleak feeling inside him expanded into a sensation of hollowness as if he and Gorbash's body together were only a shell enclosing nothing at all. Jim blinked, half inclined to think his eyes were playing tricks on him because of the wine or the smoky atmosphere of the candle-lit room. But the impression was gone in the same instant it had seemed to exist; so that he found himself unsure he had really felt anything in the first place.

He looked around at the others, but they seemed to have noticed nothing, except for Dafydd, who was looking at him penetratingly.

"Good," said Geronde. "It's settled, then."

"I do not think it is good," Dafydd put in. "In my family, from father to son and mother to daughter for many generations now, there have been eyes to see warnings. And a moment past the candle flames here all bent, though there was no wind in the hall. I do not think this going after Sir Hugh now is good at all."

"Aragh frightened you, that's all," said Danielle.

"I am not frightened. But, no more than the wolf, am I a knight to be holding or taking of castles."

"I'll make you a knight," Danielle told him. "If I make you a knight, will that do away with your doubts?"

"For shame, Danielle!" said Giles. His face had darkened. "Knighthood is no jest."

Dafydd got to his feet.

"You are making sport of me," he said. "But since you will do this thing, I'll do it also, because I love you. For now, I will go out into the clean air and the clean woods by myself."

He, too, left the hall.

"Here, here!" said Brian, cheerfully. "Let's have an end to doom-saying for a bit. Fill your cups! We've agreed now. To the soon taking of Sir Hugh and his castle!"

"And Sir Hugh himself, one day closer to the fire," added Geronde. They drank.

Early the next day they set off, without Aragh but with Giles's outlaws reinforced by some forty men drawn from Malvern Castle and the other de Chaney estates. Geronde herself had been fiercely eager to come with them; but her sense of duty to the castle and lands of her father was capable of overriding even her thirst for vengeance. So, she had agreed to stay behind. They saw her standing on the castle wall, looking after them, until the trees of the forest blocked her from view.

The morning was overcast as it had been on that day when they had retaken Malvern Castle from Sir Hugh. This day, however, the clouds did not clear. Instead they thickened, and soon a light, steady drizzle began.

Their way led at first through alternate woods and open spaces, but as the morning wore on the tree cover became general, the ground lowlying and wet. They were moving into an area of small lakes and bogs, and the wagon track they were following soon became miry and slippery. Their party straggled, and separated into groups spread out over half a mile.

But more than their pattern of travel seemed affected by the grayness of the day: the damp dullness of the atmosphere seemed to produce a sullenness of temper. Those on foot, like the outlaws and the forty men from the Castle Malvern lands, trudged along head-down against the falling water, their bowstrings cased, their weapons hooded. The outlaws' previous custom of rough jokes and friendly insults had vanished. When they spoke it was sourly, expressing their dissatisfaction with the weather, the route, and the probable cost—in deaths and wounds—of reducing the castle they were going to assault. Old arguments were dredged up between individuals and tempers grew short.

Even the leaders of the expedition seemed affected by the general change in attitude. Giles was grim, Danielle sharp-tongued and Dafydd completely uncommunicative. It was as if the whole party was reacting to a feeling that something was wrong.

Jim took refuge, at last, at the head of the column with the single exception to this general malaise: Brian on Blanchard was his invariable self. There was something cheerfully spartan and unyielding about the knight. His personal world appeared to have had all its essential questions and uncertainties settled long ago. The sun might shine, snow might fall, wine might flow or blood be spilled—but all these were surface variations, to be ignored ordinarily as beneath notice. Brian gave the impression that he would joke with his torturers as they were stretching him on the rack.

Jim told him about the way the others were acting, particularly the leaders.

"Shouldn't worry about it," said Brian.

"But it's important to keep everybody working together, isn't it? For example, what if Giles suddenly decided to pull out with all his band? We'd be left with the forty men from Malvern, half of whom don't look as if they know anything about fighting."

"I don't think Giles would do that," said the knight. "He knows there's wealth to be got for him and his lads in Sir Hugh's stronghold. Also, he's agreed to go—and was a gentleman once, pretty clearly, though he won't admit it now."

"Well, even if Giles personally can be counted on," Jim added, "there could be trouble with Danielle and Dafydd that might end up involving her father. Dafydd's been saying less with every mile, and Danielle won't let up on him. Actually, she shouldn't be along on this, anyway, except that nobody seems to have had the guts to tell her she couldn't come."

"Master Welshman wouldn't have come without her."

"True," Jim admitted. "But you have to concede she's no warrior—"

"Are you sure about that?" asked Brian. "Ever seen her shoot?"

"Just that time her arrows came at us. And in the looted village. All right, she can handle a bow—"

"Not just
a
bow," the knight said. "She draws a longbow with a hundred-pound pull, like half the archers in her father's band."

Jim blinked. Years ago in college, he had taken a passing interest in bow-hunting. Practicing at targets, he had begun with a forty-pound bow and graduated to a sixty-pound one. Sixty pounds had felt, to him, like the practical limit—and he did not consider himself weak.

"How do you know?" he asked.

"Saw her shooting after you were lanced, at the taking of Malvern Castle while some fighting was still going on."

"She was at the castle?" Jim asked, startled. "I thought she stayed in the woods. But how could you tell, just seeing her shoot?"

Brian looked sideways at him with curiosity as they moved forward together.

"It's a strange land you must come from overseas, James," he said. "By watching the arrow as it leaves her bow, of course."

"Watching her arrow?"

"See how much it lifts as it leaves the string," Brian explained. "When I saw her, she was still aiming under her mark at ten rods' distance. Pull no more than an eighty-pound bow myself. Of course, I'm no archer. But Mistress Danielle is no weakling."

Jim trudged on alongside Blanchard and the mounted knight for a long moment of silence, absorbing this.

"If she pulls a hundred-pound bow, what does Dafydd pull?"

"Lord, who knows? A hundred-and-fifty? Two-hundred? Even more than that? The Welshman doesn't fit any ordinary suit of clothes. You've seen he's his own bowyer and fletcher—and a rare craftsman at both. I wager there's not an archer in Giles' band—assuming he could draw it when he got it—who'd not give ten years' earnings for that bow of Master Dafydd's. With the longbow, the secret's all in the taper towards the ends of the bowstave, you know. Even allowing for the man's strength, it's not just a case of cutting himself a heavier, longer bow that lets him shoot the flights he does, and that accurately. There's a cunning and an art built into his weapon that goes beyond the skill of the ordinary bowyer. You heard Giles when Master Dafydd first undertook to slay the guards on the castle walls from the edge of the woods. And, of course, the same holds true for the arrows the Welshman makes. Any of these outlaw lads'd no doubt trade half the teeth in his head for a quiverful of those."

"I see," said Jim.

The information sank into the back of his mind and lay there leadenly. Once upon a time, he realized, before his encounter with Sir Hugh, he would have found this kind of information fascinating. Now, it only left him vaguely resentful—against Dafydd for possessing such knowledge and skill, and toward Brian for the condescension he thought he heard in the knight's voice when explaining it to him.

He said nothing more; and Brian, after making a few further remarks aimed at continuing the conversation, gave up and turned Blanchard about to trot back down the track and check on the rest of the expedition. Left alone, Jim plodded on, scarcely noticing where he was going. He realized he was traveling by himself now, but that suited his present mood. He had no wish for company—particularly for the company of these medieval characters, both beast and human.

In fact, now that he glanced about, himself, he could see neither people nor horses, nor anything of the wagon track they had been following. Undoubtedly the track had taken one of its reasonless curves—like a footpath, it had evidently developed along the route of easiest travel. There was no construction to it as a road at all, with the result that it often went widely out of its way to avoid a patch of bushes which a man with an ax could have cleared in an hour or two of work. It had probably detoured; and he, tied up in his thoughts, had unconsciously taken the direct route, straight ahead—in which case, he would be running into it again shortly, when it curved back to its base line of direction.

Meanwhile, as Jim was telling himself, the isolation was not unwelcome. He had had it with strange worlds, talking creatures, blood, battle, superhumans and supernatural forces—all of these in the context of a primitive technology and elemental society.