The Dragon and the George (34 page)

The club glanced off Jim's spine and he felt the ogre's arms go around him, the double triad of bone-thick fingers searching for his neck. He was caught, but his rush had knocked the ogre off its feet.

Together they rolled over and over, on the sandy earth, the ogre gnawing with his jagged teeth at Jim's chest and striving to break the spine or twist the neck, while Jim's tail lashed futilely about.

As they rolled against the standing spear and snapped it in half, the ogre found his neck hold and commenced to twist Jim's neck as if it was a chicken's being wrung in slow motion.

A wild despair flooded through Jim. He had been cautioned by Smrgol never to let the ogre get his arms around him. He had disregarded that advice and now was lost, the battle was lost. Stay away, Smrgol had warned, use your brains…

But the wild hope of a long chance sprang suddenly to life in him. His head was twisted back over his shoulder and he could see only the darkening mist above him; but he stopped fighting the ogre and groped about with both forepaws. For a moment of eternity, he located nothing—and then something hard nudged his right foreclaw, a glint of bright metal flashed before his eyes. He gripped what he had touched, clamping down on it as firmly as his clumsy claws would allow—

And, with every ounce of strength that was left to him, he drove the broken half of the snapped spear deep into the middle of the ogre, who now sprawled above him.

The great body bucked and shuddered. A wild scream burst from the idiot mouth beside Jim's ear. The ogre let go, staggered back and up, and tottered to its feet, towering above Jim as the stone edifice itself towered above them both.

Again, the ogre screamed, stumbling about like a drunken man, fumbling at the broken end of the spear that was sticking out of him. Jerking at the shaft, he screamed again; and lowering his unnatural head, bit at it like a wounded animal. It splintered in his teeth. He then screamed a final time and fell to his knees. Slowly, like a bad actor in an old-fashioned movie, he rolled over on his side and drew up his legs like someone with a cramp. An ultimate scream was drowned in the bubbling in his throat; black blood trickled from his mouth. He lay still.

Unsteadily, Jim crawled to his feet and looked about him.

The mists were, oddly, drawing back from the causeway and the thin light of late afternoon stretched long across the bouldered slope, the tower above it and the small plain below. In the rusty light, Jim saw that the worm was dead, literally hacked in two. Aragh lay, grinning, a splint on his broken leg. Brian, in bloody, dented armor, leaned wearily on a twisted sword not more than a few feet from Carolinus. Dafydd was down, his shirt half torn off, the shape of a harpy sprawled motionless across his chest. Danielle stood above him, an arrow still notched to her own bow. As Jim watched her, she slowly lowered her weapon, cast it aside and dropped down beside the Welshman.

A little further off, Secoh raised a bloody neck and head above the motionless, locked-together bodies of Smrgol and Bryagh. The mere-dragon stared dazedly at Jim. Jim moved painfully, over to him.

Looking down at the two immense dragons, he saw that Smrgol lay with his jaws locked in Bryagh's throat. The neck of the younger dragon was broken.

"Smrgol…" Jim croaked.

"No…" gasped Secoh. "No good! He's gone… I led the other one to him. He got his grip—and then he never let go…" The mere-dragon burst into sobs and lowered his head.

"They all fought well," creaked a strange, harsh voice.

Jim turned and saw the knight standing at his shoulder. Brian's face was as white as sea foam below the now-helmetless tousled brown hair. The flesh of his features seemed fallen in to the bones, like the face of an old man. He swayed as he stood.

"We have won," said Carolinus. "At a price!"

He turned to Danielle. Jim and the knight turned with him. She was still beside Dafydd; but she had pulled the harpy from Dafydd's upper body, and the shreds of his shirt. Brian's helm, now filled with water from beside the causeway, was with her and she was gently sponging a red tear that ran from near the joining of Dafydd's neck and left shoulder to his middle ribs.

Jim, the magician and the knight walked together to stand over the two of them. With his shirt off, Dafydd's upper body looked twice as large as it had, clothed. It was a sculptor's find of a chest: the shoulders lay back, square and incredibly broad of bone, and powerful muscle lay in cables across the bowman's lean torso from the pectorals to the abdominals, as if molded by an anatomist building a display model. But the body was limp now, and still.

"Indeed," said Dafydd to Danielle, so faintly that, had it not been for the utter stillness now all about them, the three watchers would not have understood him, "you are wishing the impossible. As the Mage said, their bite is death, and I feel that death now in me."

"No," said Danielle, sponging away at the ragged slash the harpy's teeth had made in him.

"But it is so," Dafydd insisted, "though I wish it were not so, for that I love you. But to every bowman comes death, in time. I have always known this, and am content."

"You are no longer merely a bowman." Danielle's voice was steady and composed. "I made you a knight and you are a knight; and as a knight, it's ungentlemanly of you to take leave without my permission. And I do not wish you to go. I will not let you go!"

With a strength that startled Jim, for all that Brian had told him about how she pulled a hundred-pound warbow, Danielle lifted his upper body easily in her arms, laid his head against her shoulder and held him to her.

"I have you," she said; and though her eyes were perfectly dry and her voice quite calm, almost businesslike, the sound of it wrung Jim's very guts, "and I'll never give you to anything else—even to death—unless you want to leave me. You have to tell me you want to leave me, or else you can't die."

Dafydd smiled faintly.

"Indeed…" he said; and in that moment after, in which he said nothing, Jim was ready to believe that the single, faintly breathed word had been his last.

But the bowman spoke again.

"Then it's true, that you really wish me to live. If so then death must come get me against my will, which I do not think it or any other thing can do, since never have I been forced against my will nor shall be now, look you."

He closed his eyes, turned his head a little to rest against her breast and said nothing more. But his chest continued slowly to rise and fall steadily.

"He'll live," Carolinus said to Danielle. "He asked no price for coming here, and not even the Auditing Department can ask a price of him, now that he's helped win this day."

The girl did not answer the magician, but bowed her head above Dafydd's slowly moving chest and sat holding him as if she would sit there forever, if necessary. Jim, Brian and the magician turned back to Aragh, and to Secoh, who had conquered the explosion of his grief and now sat quietly above the body of Smrgol.

"We have won," said Carolinus. "Not again in our lifetimes will this place gather strength enough to break out against the world."

He turned to Jim.

"And now, James," he said. You wanted to go home. The way is open."

"Good," said Jim.

"Home?" asked Brian. "Now?"

"Now," said Carolinus. "He has wished from the beginning to return to his own place, Sir knight. Fear not, the dragon who's the original owner of this body James has been wearing will remember all that's happened here and be your friend."

"Fear?" Brian somehow managed to dig up a spark of energy to spend on hauteur. "I fear no dragon, dammit! It's just that… I shall miss you, James!"

Staring at Brian, Jim saw the knight's eyes unexpectedly brimming with tears. He had forgotten learning, in his studies of the European Middle Ages, that people cried then as naturally as they laughed; his own self-conscious twentieth-century self felt acute embarrassment at the sight.

"Well, you know…" he muttered.

"Well, well, James," said Brian, wiping his eyes on a trailing end of Geronde de Chaney's favor. "What must, must! In any case, in respect to the old boy here"—he nodded at the dead Smrgol—"I'm going to see what can be done about this dragon-human alliance business, so I'll be seeing a fair amount of whoever owns this body you've been in, and it'll be somewhat like having you around, in any case."

"He was great!" burst out Secoh, staring at the body of the old dragon at his feet. "He made me strong—for the first time in my life. Anything he wanted, I'd do it!"

"You come along with me, then, to vouch for the dragon end of things," said Brian. "Well, James. I suppose it's good-bye, then—"

"Angie!" cried Jim, suddenly remembering. "Oh—excuse me, Brian. But I just remembered. I've got to go get her out of the tower."

He spun around.

"Wait!" said Carolinus.

The magician turned to face the edifice itself; and raised his wand.

"Deliver!" he cried. "You are vanquished. Deliver!"

They waited.

Nothing happened.

Carolinus struck his wand once more, endwise, upon the hard sand.

"
Deliver!"
he cried.

Once more they waited. The slow seconds stretched out into minutes.

"By the Powers!" Suddenly, strength seemed to have flowed back into S. Carolinus. His voice was once more full and he looked to have grown six inches. "Are we to be flouted?
Auditing Department!"

Something happened then that Jim was never to forget. The memorability of it lay not in what happened, but in the quality of the event. Without warning, the whole earth spoke—the sea spoke—the sky spoke! And they all spoke with the same, single, bass voice that had responded from thin air to Carolinus before, when Jim was present. This time, however, nothing was apologetic or humorous about the voice.

"DELIVER!" it said.

Almost in the same second, something dark came swiftly out of the blackness of the arched, ground-level entrance to the tower. Drifting down the slope toward them, it seemed to float; but it arrived more quickly than its leisurely velocity indicated. It was a mattress of intertwined fir boughs, the needles still fresh and green upon them; and on that mattress Angie lay, her eyes closed.

The mattress reached them and settled to the ground at Jim's feet.

"Angie!" he exclaimed, bending over her.

For a moment a deep fear had stirred in him; but then he saw that she was breathing steadily and calmly, as if only sleeping. In fact, as he watched, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

"Jim!" she said.

Scrambling to her feet, she threw her arms around his scaly neck and hung on to him. Jim's heart did a flip-flop in his chest. His conscience ripped him like a bandsaw for not having thought of her more during the past days, for not having managed to come for her sooner.

"Angie…" he murmured tenderly—and then something struck him. "Angie, how did you know it was me, and not some other dragon?"

She let go and looked up at him, laughing.

"Know it was you!" she exclaimed. "How could I miss, after all this time in your head—"

She broke off suddenly and stared down at herself.

"Oh, I'm back in my own body, again! That's better. That's much better!"

"Head? Body?" Jim's mind wobbled between two incredible questions; and finally chose the one that sounded the more ominous. "Angie, whose body were you in?"

"Yours, of course," she said. "That is, I was in your mind, which was in your body—or Gorbash's body, to be exact. At least, I
was
—unless I'm dreaming now. No, there they all are, just the way they should be: Brian, Dafydd, Danielle and the rest."

"But how could you be in my mind?" demanded Jim.

"The Dark Powers, or whatever they call themselves, put me there," said Angie. "I didn't catch on, at first. Right after Bryagh brought me here, I got sleepy and lay down on those fir branches. The next thing I knew, I was in your head—seeing everything that was going on. I could tell what you were thinking, and I could almost talk to you. At first I thought some accident had happened; or maybe Grottwold had been trying to bring us back and got us mixed up together this time. Then I caught on."

"Caught on?"

"The Dark Powers had put me there."

"The Dark Powers?" Jim asked.

"Of course," said Angie, calmly. "They were hoping I'd want to be rescued so badly that I'd keep trying to push you to come to the Loathly Tower here, alone. When I was about half asleep, I thought I heard some voice or other talking to Bryagh about ways of getting you to come after me without Companions to help you."

"How did they know?" Jim frowned.

"I don't know, but they did," said Angie. "So, when I remembered that, it wasn't hard to guess who'd put me in your mind, and why. As I say, I couldn't really
talk
to you, but I could make you feel the way I was feeling, if I sort of pushed hard enough, mentally. Remember when Brian told you he had to get Geronde's permission to be a Companion of yours and you would both have to go to Castle Malvern, first? You remember how you suddenly felt guilty about turning your back on the tower, with me there? Well, that was me in your mind. I'd just woken up there, and didn't realize why. Then it hit me that you might be in pretty terrible danger going on to the tower alone, if Carolinus had insisted you get some Companions before trying it; and I remembered what I'd heard when I was falling asleep. I put two and two together, and stopped wishing you'd come to rescue me. The moment I did that, I could tell that you began to feel better about going with Brian to Castle Malvern."

She ceased talking. Jim stared at her, too full of questions to sort out what he wanted to ask first. Now that he had a moment to notice, he realized that apparently Angie had grown in translating to this other world. He had thought of Danielle as tall, but now he saw that Angie was equally so. Not that she looked any the worse for the increase in size. To the contrary—

Carolinus clicked his tongue.

"Two minds in one body!" he said, shaking his head. "Highly irregular! Highly! Even for the Dark Powers, that's taking a chance. Could be done, of course; but—"