The Dragon and the George (25 page)

When you got down to it, he thought, there was a limit to how much living you could do with animals. Smrgol and Aragh, as well as the other dragons, were animals in spite of the fact that they could talk. For that matter, the humans he had met were no better—human animals, operating by custom, instinct or emotion, but never by civilized thought. For all her beauty, Danielle was hardly more than a fur-clad female out of the Stone Age. Similarly, for all his craft and skill, Dafydd could have stepped right out of a Cro-Magnon hunting party. Giles was a clever old criminal, no more; and Brian was a pain-indifferent killing machine who thought with his muscles. As for Geronde—she was a pure savage in her happy anticipation of the torture she would inflict on her enemy once she had captured him.

What had made him think—back in the cleanliness and comfort of the twentieth-century world he belonged to—that he would ever find it attractive, let alone pleasant, to live with people like these? Their redeeming qualities were nil. Any obligation or affection he might think he was developing toward them was nothing but the product of a false romanticism.

He broke off at this point in his thoughts to realize that he had been traveling for some time and had not yet come upon the wagon track or seen any sign of the rest of the party. Possibly the wagon track had run out. Possibly they had turned off on some other route. Possibly, even, they had decided to halt for the day—because the rain was now coming down quite heavily. Well, in any case, they could take care of themselves; and he could rejoin them tomorrow. He felt no need of their company; and with his dragon's insensitiveness to temperature and weather, it made little difference to him that the day had grown wet and chilly.

In fact, now that he thought of it, it suited his own mood to have the day drawing to a prematurely gray close and the skies pouring down upon the dripping trees and sodden earth that surrounded him.

Nevertheless, he looked about, picked out a grove of trees and walked over to it. It was a simple matter to pull up some of the larger saplings by the roots and lean their tops together, teepee-fashion, to produce a makeshift shelter. The interlaced tops, still thick with leaves, did provide him some protection against the falling rain.

Jim curled up inside the shelter with a good deal of satisfaction. The day was gathering into gloom, now. He had no idea where the others were, he could not find them if he wanted to, and that was as it should be.

They could not find him either—and
that
was as it should be…

He was preparing to tuck his head under a wing, when a sound registered on him that he had been hearing faintly but which had been growing slowly in volume for some time. For a second his mind refused to identify it; and then recognition came, clear and unmistakable.

Sandmirks—approaching.

Jim was out of the shelter before he realized he had moved—and was ready to run. What checked him was the same instinct he felt at the time he had encountered sandmirks before: the wordless understanding that to try to run from them was the beginning of the end. It was a knowledge that came from the deepest levels of Gorbash's brain.

He stood where he was, in the increasing darkness, his jaws parted, his tongue flickering in and out between them. His breath was snarled in his throat. If he had any idea in which direction Brian and the others could be found, there might be some sense in running. If he could reach them, there was perhaps safety in numbers. Just why there should be, he was not quite sure; but the impression persisted, instinctively. Furthermore, he knew that sandmirks vastly preferred to attack a helpless and outnumbered victim. Maybe a large group of humans or animals together could resist the fear the sandmirks tried to breed in the minds of those they wanted to destroy and devour. If the victims could resist, then they might be able to attack the sandmirks in turn. The sandmirks, as he had seen, were not likely to stand against those who had no fear of them—witness, the speed with which they had fled when Aragh had driven them off.

But which way should he go to find the expedition against Sir Hugh? As he had considered earlier, they might have diverged from the path or halted for the night, some time since. They might even have turned back. If he began to run and it turned out he was headed in the wrong direction, he would be running into the sandmirks' jaws.

One thing was certain: he had no Aragh to come to his rescue here. Even if the wolf had hung around Malvern long enough to see whether Jim would, indeed, go along on the expedition, he would have had his worst fears confirmed long since; and he would have taken off in a direction back to his own woods. He would be miles beyond hearing the voices that were closing in on Jim now.

Fear and rage, combined, flared like living flames inside Jim. The breath snarled once more in his throat. His head darted left and right, reflexively, like the head of a driven animal hearing the sounds of the beaters closing in on it from all sides. There had to be some way out. Some way…

But there was none.

The frantic, instinctive darting of his head slowed and then stopped. The rage in him died. Now he was only afraid, and the fear filled him completely. At last, he faced the fact that he was right to be afraid: there was something wrong with him if he was not. It was death he heard coming—his death.

He stood in the rainy darkness, hearing the chittering of the sandmirks growing closer. They were only minutes away from surrounding him now. He had no place to flee to; and it would be too late to flee once they had arrived. His mind reached the furthest possible limit of despair and went beyond, into a kind of limitless, colorless clarity.

He saw himself clearly now. He had wandered off, rehearsing in his mind all the things he could find wrong with Brian and the others. But the arguments against them that he had summoned up were only a smoke screen for what was wrong with himself. It was not Brian, Smrgol, Aragh and the others who were so much less than he, but he who was so much less than they. If it had not been for the accident that had landed him in the powerful flesh he now wore, he would be nothing. In his own body he would not have been able to qualify as the least member of Giles' band. Could he pull a hundred-pound longbow, let alone hit anything with an arrow from it? Could he, clad in the best armor in the world and mounted on the best warhorse, delude himself that he could last as an opponent of Brian's or Sir Hugh's for two minutes?

He knew better now. It was very ego-pampering to cannon into men-at-arms whom he outweighed five to one and send them flying. It was very comfortable to tell people living in a rigidly stratified society that he had been a baron, and let them surmise that he had perhaps been a prince. But what had happened when a real lance actually went through him? All at once the fun had gone out of the game. He was ready to pick up his marbles and go home.

Now, alone, with the sandmirks closing in on him, and facing himself at last, he saw that this was no soft world he and Angie had landed in. It was a hard one; and all those he had met here—Smrgol, Brian, Aragh, Giles, Dafydd, Danielle, even Secoh and Dick Innkeeper—were battle-scarred survivors of it. They were survivors because they had the courage required to survive. That courage he had resented in them when he had flown onto the lance point of Hugh de Bois and discovered that he could be killed, just like anyone else. The discovery had woken him to a realization of how little of their sort of courage he had ever been called on—in his own world—to show.

Now it no longer mattered whether he could be courageous or not, because he was going to die, anyway. The sandmirks were just beyond the trees that ringed him; and the panic born of their cluttering was beginning to eat at his brain. They would be certain of him this time. He had not even a campfire to keep them at a distance. Cleverly, once again, they had come on a rainy, cloud-thick night when a dragon could not take to the air for fear of flying blindly into a tree or cliff; and when he, like any ordinary earth-bound animal, could only attempt to escape on foot. The only difference now from the time before was that he had at last come to terms with himself—a single, small triumph, the one thing that made him different from a simple dragon-victim.

The breath checked in his lungs. For a moment even the sandmirk voices were forgotten. He had, at least, a final choice. He would die either way, but he could still choose how. What was it he had said to Carolinus, back when they first met? '… But I'm not a dragon?'"

Nor was he. Gorbash might have no choice in this situation, but he was Jim Eckert, who had. He could go down, he could die, still trying to reach the Loathly Tower and rescue Angie—by himself, if necessary—not as a helpless meal for sandmirks.

It might be death to fly, but he preferred that death to staying here. He gaped his jaws and roared at the sandmirks. He crouched and sprang upward into the rain and the darkness; and the sound of the cluttering faded quickly to silence and was lost, far below and behind.

Pumping his wings, he reached for altitude. It was a forlorn hope to think that the cloud cover would be low enough for him to mount above it. And, even if it was, and he did, above those clouds and rain on a night like this one where would he find thermals to soar on? A good wind could save him—but weather like this did not go with strong, steady winds above a layer of rainclouds. If he could not soar, sooner or later he would become wing-weary and start to lose altitude. After that the crash to earth would be inevitable.

But for now, his strength was still with him. He beat upward through the downpour. Darkness surrounded him—before, behind, above, below. He felt as if he were hanging still in a wet and lightless void, exerting all his strength but going nowhere. No pause came in the rain, no rift in the darkness overhead to show a patch of starlit sky.

Judging by the altitude he had gained previously in a first few minutes of upward flying, he thought he should easily be above five thousand feet by this time. He tried to remember what he knew about rainclouds. Most precipitation, he vaguely remembered learning once, fell from nimbostratus, altostratus or cumulonimbus clouds. Cumulonimbus were lowlying, but the other two were in a middle range—up to twenty thousand feet or so. Clearly, he could not fly above twenty thousand feet. His lungs were the lungs of any animal adapted to a planetary surface. He would run out of oxygen at that altitude—even if the cold of the higher air did not freeze him.

A faint but steady wind pushed the rain along at his present altitude; and instinctively he had been heading into it to gain lift. He took a chance now and stiffened out his wings in soaring position while he caught his breath. He had no visible evidence that he was losing altitude, but he could feel the pressure of the air on the underside of his wings; and this sensation sent clear signals to his dragon-brain that he was now on a shallow glide back toward the ground. He dared not prolong the glide. He might be losing altitude faster than he thought.

He began to use his wings again, and his pressure points signaled that he was once more gaining altitude, though at a slow rate. His mind, working at a steady white heat from the moment he had decided to leave the sandmirks on the ground behind, now tossed something at him out of the very back of his reading experience: a passage from a very old book dealing with somebody lost underwater who no longer knew even which way was up to the surface. He had thought, when he had read that passage, that what, was needed in such a situation was some sort of diver's personal sonar. That memory triggered off in his mind the recollection that not only was his dragon-voice of unusual proportions but his eyesight and hearing were unhumanly sensitive. Bats could fly blind at night, or even—as experimenters had discovered—when the animals had been physically blinded, because of their echo-sounding—their sonar. What if he could do something like that?

Jim opened his mouth, gathered the full force of his lungs, and sent a wordless cry booming out into the falling rain and darkness around him.

He listened…

He was not sure whether he had heard anything echoing back at him.

He boomed again. And listened… and listened… straining his ears.

This time, he thought he heard an echo of some sort.

Once more he boomed, and once more he listened. This time, clearly, an echo returned. Something was below him and off to his right.

Lowering his head toward the ground below, he boomed again.

His dragon-hearing was evidently quick to learn. This time he was able to make out, not only a general echo, but some differences in the areas from which the echoes came. Far to his right, the response was soft, close to his right it was sharp, and far to his left it became soft again. If these were any indication, they should signal a hard surface almost directly underneath him.

He checked on that thought. It was not so likely that the echoes indicated hard surface, as that they did a reflective one. This could mean that right under him was an area of open land, while to right and left were areas where tree growth interfered with echo response. He stopped experimenting and resumed flying, while he thought this out. The real problem, he told himself, was to discover if he could determine the distances between himself and the source of the echoes. A sort of glee ran through him. It was not that, even now, he had any real belief in his ability to save himself—win an overall victory against the sandmirks. He was merely doing something about his situation.

He flew for a while, again deliberately trying to gain altitude—enough so that he would be able to tell by what he heard whether there was any real difference between the echoes he had caught at a lower altitude. He once again stiffened his wings into soaring position and sent his pulse of sound winging into the rain-drenched darkness.

The echoes came back—and for the first time hope leaped up within Jim. For what he was hearing was essentially the same distribution of strong echoes and weak—indications of high reflective surfaces adjoining softly reflective ones—in the same directions in which he had found them before, but with a very clear weakening of the echoes—an obvious indication that the echoes' strength might be usable as indexes to his height.