“You’re wrong,” he said hopelessly. “You have to be wrong.” He turned back to John. “It’ll take us weeks to get back, traveling overland...”
“Us?” John said softly, and Gareth blushed and looked as frightened as if he had uttered mortal insult. After a moment John went on, “How big is this dragon of yours?”
Gareth swallowed again and drew his breath in a shaky sigh. “Huge,” he said dully.
“How huge?”
Gareth hesitated. Like most people, he had no eye for relative size. “It must have been a hundred feet long. They say the shadow of its wings covered the whole of Deeping Vale.”
“Who says?” John inquired, shifting his weight sideways in the chair and hooking a knee over the fornicating sea-lions that made up the left-hand arm. “I thought it came at night, and munched up anyone close enough to see it by day.”
“Well...” He floundered in a sea of third-hand rumor.
“Ever see it on the ground?”
Gareth blushed and shook his head.
“It’s gie hard to judge things in the air,” John said kindly, pushing up his specs again. “The drake I slew here looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail.” Again his quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. “It comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was put together, what there was left of it.”
“It could be bigger, though, couldn’t it?” Gareth asked. He sounded a little worried, as if. Jenny thought dryly, he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat paltry. “I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with wings that would cover a battalion.”
“Anybody measure it?”
“Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to think of it, according to that variant, when Selkythar had wounded it unto death the dragon fell into the River Wildspae; and in a later Belmarie version it says it fell into the sea. So I don’t see how anyone could have.”
“So a sixty-foot dragon is just somebody’s measure of how great Selkythar was.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands absentmindedly tracing over the lunatic carvings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flickered with a dull sheen in the stray glints of the fire. “Twenty-seven feet doesn’t sound like a lot, ’til it’s there spitting fire at you. You know their flesh will decompose almost as soon as they die? It’s as if their own fire consumes them, as it does everything else.”
“Spitting fire?” Gareth frowned. “All the songs say they breathe it.”
Aversin shook his head. “They sort of spit it—it’s liquid fire, and nearly anything it touches’ll catch. That’s the trick in fighting a dragon, you see—to stay close enough to its body that it won’t spit fire at you for fear of burning itself, and not get rolled on or cut to pieces with its scales whilst you’re about it. They can raise the scales along their sides like a blowfish bristling, and they’re edged like razors.”
“I never knew that,” Gareth breathed. Wonder and curiosity lessened, for a moment, the shell of his offended dignity and pride.
“Well, the pity of it is, probably the King’s champions didn’t either. God knows, I didn’t when I went after the dragon in the gorge. There was nothing about it in any book I could find—Dotys and Clivy and them. Only a few old granny-rhymes that mention dragons—or drakes or worms, they’re called—and they weren’t much help. Things like:
“Or what Polyborus had in his Analects about certain villages believing that if you plant loveseed—those creeper-things with the purple trumpet-flowers on them—around your house, dragons won’t come near. Jen and I used bits of that kind of lore—Jen brewed a poison from the loveseed to put on my harpoons, because it was obvious on the face of it that no fiddling little sword was going to cut through those scales. And the poison did slow the thing down. But I don’t know near as much about them as I’d like.”
“No.” Jenny turned her eyes at last from the fire’s throbbing core and, resting her cheek upon her hand where it lay on her up-drawn knees, regarded the two men on either side of the book-cluttered table. She spoke softly, half to herself. “We know not where they come from, nor where they breed; why of all the beasts of the earth they have six limbs instead of four...”
“‘Maggots from meat,’” quoted John, “‘weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.’ That’s in Terens’ Of Ghosts. Or Caerdinn’s ‘Save a dragon, slave a dragon.’ Or why they say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes—and I’ll tell you. Gar, I was gie careful not to do that. We don’t even know simple things, like why magic and illusion won’t work on them; why Jen couldn’t call the dragon’s image in that jewel of hers, or use a cloakingspell against his notice—nothing.”
“Nothing,” Jenny said softly, “save how they died, slain by men as ignorant of them as we.”
John must have beard the strange sorrow that underlay her voice, for she felt his glance, worried and questioning. But she turned her eyes away, not knowing the answer to what he asked.
After a moment, John sighed and said to Gareth, “It’s all knowledge that’s been lost over the years, like Luciard’s Firegiver and how they managed to build a breakwater across the harbor mouth at Eldsbouch—knowledge that’s been lost and may never be recovered.”
He got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, the flat, whitish gray reflections from the window winking on spike and mail-scrap and the brass of dagger-hilt and buckle. “We’re living in a decaying world. Gar; things slipping away day by day. Even you, down south in Bel—you’re losing the Realm a piece at a time, with the Winterlands tearing off in one direction and the rebels pulling away the Marches in another. You’re losing what you had and don’t even know it, and all that while knowledge is leaking out the seams, like meal from a ripped bag, because there isn’t time or leisure to save it. I would never have slain the dragon. Gar—slay it, when we know nothing about it? And it was beautiful in itself, maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, every color of it perfect as sunset, like a barley field in certain lights you get on summer evenings.”
“But you must—you have to slay ours!” There was sudden agony in Gareth’s voice.
“Fighting it and slaying it are two different things.” John turned back from the window, his head tipped slightly to one side, regarding the boy’s anxious face. “And I haven’t yet said I’d undertake the one, let alone accomplish the other.”
“But you have to.” The boy’s voice was a forlorn whisper of despair. “You’re our only hope.”
“Am I?” the Dragonsbane asked gently. “I’m the only hope of all these villagers, through the coming winter, against wolves and bandits. It was because I was their only hope that I slew the most perfect creature I’d ever seen, slew it dirtily, filthily, chopping it to pieces with an ax—it was because I was their only hope that I fought it at all and near had my flesh shredded from my bones by it. I’m only a man, Gareth.”
“No!” the boy insisted desperately. “You’re the Dragonsbane—the only Dragonsbane!” He rose to his feet, some inner struggle plain upon his thin features, his breathing fast as if forcing himself to some exertion. “The King...” He swallowed hard. “The King told me to make whatever terms I could, to bring you south. If you come...” With an effort he made his voice steady. “If you come, we will send troops again to protect the northlands, to defend them against the Iceriders; we will send books, and scholars, to bring knowledge to the people again. I swear it.” He took up the King’s seal and held it out in his trembling palm, and the cold daylight flashed palely across its face. “In the King’s name I swear it.”