The Dragon and the George (4 page)

"Gorbash!" thundered this individual, jerking his head around and identifying himself by this cry as the maternal grand-uncle again. "A little respect, blast you, boy!"

"Sorry!" boomed Jim. He was still not used to his dragon-voice and the apology came out like the explosion of a signal cannon.

But apparently Smrgol was not offended.

"That's all right, that's all right. No harm done," he thundered back. "Sit down here, lad." He leaned over to rear in the ear of the dragon next to him. "Make room for my grand-nephew, here."

"What? Oh, it's you, Smrgol!" bellowed the other dragon, turning his head to look. He shifted over about eight feet. "All right, Gorbash, squeeze in. We're just getting down to discussion on the george, now."

Jim pushed his way between the two of them, sat down and began to try to make sense of what was going on around him. Apparently the dragons in this world all spoke modern English… Or did they? Now that he listened closely to the verbal tumult around him, the words that his ear was hearing seemed to disagree with the sense that his mind was making out of it. Maybe he was talking "dragon" and didn't know it? He decided to file that question for examination at a more leisurely moment.

He looked about. The great sculptured cave in which he found himself had seemed at first to be aswarm with literally thousands of dragons. On closer look, the idea of thousands gave way to hundreds, and this in turn resolved itself to a saner estimate of perhaps fifty dragons of all sizes. Size-wise, Jim was pleased to note, he was not among the smallest there. In fact, no dragon close to him at the moment, with the single exception of Smrgol, could compare to him in size. There was, however, a monster across the room, one of those who seemed to be doing most of the talking, gesturing now and then to a box-like shape of about dragon size, placed beside him on the stone floor and covered with a richly worked piece of tapestry that looked far beyond the capability of dragon claws to produce.

As for the discussion—verbal brawl was perhaps a better description of it. A discussion among dragons appeared to consist of all of them talking at once. Their voices were tremendous in volume and the stone walls and ceiling seemed to shiver under the resonances of the titanic bellowing. Smrgol lost no time in getting into it.

"Shut up, you—Bryagh!" he exploded at the oversize dragon beside the tapestry-covered object. "Let someone get a word in edgewise who's had more experience with georges and the rest of the upper world than everyone else of you put together. When I slew the ogre of Gonnely Keep there wasn't a dragon here that was out of the shell yet."

"Do we have to listen to your battle with that ogre one more time?" roared the oversize Bryagh. "This is important!"

"Listen, you inchworm!" Smrgol thundered. "It takes brains to beat an ogre—something you haven't got. Brains run in my family. If another ogre cropped up nowadays, me and Gorbash here'd be the only two tails seen above ground for the next eighty years!"

The argument between the two gradually dominated the lesser bellowings that were going on. One by one, Jim noticed, the other dragons shut up and sat back to listen, until only his grand-uncle and Bryagh were left shouting at each other.

"… Well, what do you want to do about it, then?" Bryagh was demanding. "I caught it right above the main cave entrance. It's a spy, that's what it is."

"Spy? What makes you think it's a spy? Georges don't go spying on dragons, they come looking for a fight. Fought a good many in my time that way." Smrgol expanded his chest.

"Fight!" sneered Bryagh. "Ever hear of a george nowadays out to fight without its shell? Ever since the first george we've known, when they were looking for a fight they had their shells on. This one was practically peeled!"

Smrgol winked ponderously at the dragons near him.

"Sure you didn't peel it yourself?" he boomed.

"Does it look like it? Look!"

And, reaching down, Bryagh twitched off the tapestry from the box-like shape, revealing an iron cage. In the cage, crouching miserably behind its rough bars, was—

"ANGIE!" Jim cried.

He had forgotten the tremendous capabilities of the dragon-voice. Or, rather, he had not yet had a real chance to test them out. He had instinctively called Angie's name at the top of his lungs, and a shout at the top of a dragon's lungs was something to hear—provided you had earplugs and were safely over the horizon.

Even that oversize assembly in the cave was shaken. As for Angie, she was either blasted flat on her back or fainted.

Gorbash's grand-uncle was the first to recover from the shock.

"Blast it, boy!" he bellowed, in what Jim now unhappily realized were normal dragon conversational tones, "you don't have to burst our eardrums! What do you mean—'hanchee'?"

Jim had been thinking fast.

"I sneezed," he said.

A dead silence greeted this remark. Finally Bryagh retorted.

"Who ever heard of a dragon sneezing?"

"Who?
Who?"
snorted Smrgol.
"I
heard of a dragon sneezing. Before your time, of course. Old Malgu, my mother's sister's third cousin, once removed, sneezed twice on one day a hundred and eighty-three years ago. Don't tell me you never heard of a dragon sneezing. Sneezing runs in our family. It's a sign of brains."

"That's right," put in Jim hastily. "A sign my brains are working. Busy brains make your nose itch."

"You tell 'em, boy!" Smrgol rumbled, in the second dubious silence following this remark.

"I'll bet!" roared Bryagh. He turned to the rest of the assembly. "You all know Gorbash. Mooning around aboveground half the time, making friends with hedgehogs and wolves and what all! Smrgol here's been talking up his grand-nephew for years, but Gorbash's never showed anything yet that I know of—least of all, brains! Shut up, Gorbash!"

"Why should I?" Jim shouted, hastily. "I've got as good a right to talk as anyone else here. About this—uh—george, here—"

"Kill it!"

"Burn it alive!"

"Hold a raffle, and the winning diamond gets to eat it," a roar of suggestions interrupted him.

"No!" he thundered. "Listen to me—"

"No,
is right," trumpeted Bryagh. "
I
found this george. If anybody gets to eat it, it'll be me." He glared around the cave. "But I got a better use for this george. I say, let's stake it out where the other georges can see it. Then, when some of them come to get it back, we'll jump them when they aren't expecting it and grab the lot of them. Then we'll sell them all back to the rest of the georges for a lot of gold."

When Bryagh said the word "gold," Jim saw all the dragon eyes around him light up and glitter; and he also felt a hot bite of avarice warming his own veins. The thought of gold rang in his head like the thought of a fountain of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Gold… A slow, swelling murmur of approval, like the surf of a distant sea storm, rose up in the cave.

Jim fought down the gold hunger in his own dragon-breast, and felt panic rising in its stead. Somehow he had to turn them all from this plan of Bryagh's. For a moment he toyed with the wild idea of snatching up Angie, cage and all, and making a run for it. Even as he thought this, it came to him that it was not such a wild idea after all. Until he was able to see Angie close to Bryagh—and Bryagh was about his own size—he had not realized how big he was. Even squatting on his haunches, as he was not, his head was in the neighborhood of nine feet off the floor of the cave. Standing upright on all four feet, he would probably measure six feet or better at a front shoulder, with as much as half that length again of powerful, limber tail. If he could catch the other dragons all looking the other way for a moment…

But then it sank in on him that he did not know the way out of this underground place. He had to assume that a further opening dimly seen at the cave's far end led to a passage which would take him to the surface. Some faint, Gorbash-memory seemed to assure him this was so. But he could not count on the subconscious memories of this body he was inhabiting. If he should lose his way—be trapped with his back against some wall, or in some blind passage—the other dragons might well tear him apart; and Angie, even if she survived that battle, would lose her only possible rescuer. There had to be another way.

"Wait a minute," he called out. "Hold on!"

"Shut up, Gorbash!" thundered Bryagh.

"Shut up, yourself!" Jim bellowed back. "I told you my brains were busy. They just came up with the best idea yet."

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Angie sitting up in her cage with a dazed expression, and felt relief. The sight gave him courage and he doubled the volume of his voice.

"This is a female george you've got here. Maybe that didn't strike any of you as something important; but I've been aboveground often enough to learn a thing or two. Sometimes female georges are especially valuable—"

At Jim's shoulder, Smrgol cleared his throat with a sound like an airhammer biting into particularly stubborn concrete.

"Absolutely correct!" he boomed. "It might even be a princess we've got. Looks to me something like a princess. Now, a lot of you nowadays don't know what princesses are; but in the old days many a dragon found a whole pack of georges after him because the george he picked up turned out to be a princess. When I fought the ogre of Gormely Keep, he had a princess locked up along with his pack of other female georges. And you ought to have seen the georges when they got that princess back. Now, if we stake this one out, they might send a regular army against us to try and get it back… No, staking it out's too risky. Might as well just cut our losses and eat—"

"On the other hand," shouted Jim, quickly, "if we treat her well and hold her—'it,' I mean—for a hostage, then we can make the georges do anything we want—"

"
No
!" roared Bryagh. "It's my george. I won't stand for—"

"By my tail and wings!"
The tremendous lung power of Smrgol cut the other dragon off. "Are we a community, or a tribe of mere-dragons? If this george is actually a princess and can be used to stop these shelled georges from hunting us all over the landscape, then it's a community property. Oh yes, I see some of you with the gold-lust still in your eyes; but just stop and think that the life-lust is maybe something just a little bit more important. How many of you here would like to face just a single george in his shell, with his horn aimed at you? Eh? We've had enough of this nonsense. The boy here's got a real idea—surprised I didn't think of it myself. But then my nose wasn't itching; his was. I vote we hold the george here hostage until young Gorbash can go find out what it's worth to the other ones. How about it?"

Slowly at first, and then with mounting enthusiasms, the dragon community voted to do as Smrgol had suggested. Bryagh completely lost his temper, swore for forty straight seconds at near full dragon-volume, and stamped out of the meeting. Seeing the excitement was over, other members of the community began to drift off.

"Come, my boy," Smrgol puffed, leading the way to the cage, and covering it once more with the tapestry. "Pick up the whole thing, there. Careful! Not too quickly. You don't want to shake the george around too much. Now, follow me. We'll take it up to one of the topside caves opening on the cliff face. Georges can't fly, so it'll be safe enough there. We can even let it out of the cage and it'll get some light and air. Georges need that."

Jim, carrying the cage, followed the older dragon up a number of winding passages until they came out into a small cave with a narrow—by dragon standards—opening on thin air. Jim set the cage down, Smrgol rolled a boulder into place to block the entrance by which they had come, and Jim stepped to the edge of the outer opening to look around at the countryside. He caught his breath at the sight: one-hundred-plus feet of sheer cliffside drop to the jagged rocks below.

"Well, Gorbash," said Smrgol, coming up beside him and draping a friendly tail over the younger dragon's armor-plated shoulders. "You've talked yourself into a job. Now, my boy, I don't want you to be offended at what I'm going to say."

He cleared his throat.

"The truth is," he went on, "just between the two of us, you really aren't too bright, you know. All that running around on the surface you used to do and consorting with that fox, wolf, or whatever-it-was friend of yours was not the right sort of education at all for a growing dragon. Probably I should have put my foot down; but you're the last of our family, and I… well, I thought there wouldn't be any harm in letting you have a little fun and freedom when you were young. I've always backed you up before the other dragons, of course, because blood's thicker than water, and all that. But brains really aren't your strength—"

"I may be brighter than you think," Jim said, grimly.

"Now, now, don't be touchy. This is just between you and me, in private. It's no disgrace for a dragon to be thick-headed. It
is
a disadvantage in this modern world, though, now that georges have learned how to grow shells and long, sharp horns and stings. But the point I want to impress on you is something I wouldn't admit to any other dragon. If we're to survive, sooner or later we're going to have to come to some kind of terms with these georges. This constant warfare doesn't seem to be cutting down
their
numbers much, but it's decimating
our
ranks. Oh, you don't know what that word means—"

"Of course I do."

"You surprise me, my boy." Smrgol looked at him, startled. "What's it mean, then? Tell me!"

"The destruction of a considerable part of—that's what it means."

"By the primal egg! Maybe there's hope for you after all. Well, well. What I wanted to do was impress you with the importance of your mission, and also with its dangers. Don't take chances, Grand-nephew. You're my only surviving relative; and, in all kindness I say it—in spite of all that muscle of yours—any shelled george with a bit of experience would chop you up in an hour or so."