Moddo had fitted the trap with four good, thick chains, attached to eighteen-inch steel pegs, which we hammered into the ground. Again, Marhouse did the thinking. They needed to be offset (his word) so that if it pulled this way or that, there’d be three chains offering maximum resistance—well, it made sense when he said it. He’s got that sort of brain, invents clever machines and devices for around the farm. Most of them don’t work, but some of them do.
The trap, of course, was Plan A. Plan B was the scorpion, set up seventy-five yards away under the busted chestnut tree, with all that gorse and briars for cover. The idea was, we had a direct line of sight, but if we missed and he came at us, he wouldn’t dare swoop in too close, for fear of smashing his wings on the low branches. That bit was me.
We propped the poor dead goat up on sticks so it wasn’t actually pressing on the floorplate of the trap, then scampered back to where we’d set up the scorpion. Luitprand got volunteered to drive the cart back to Castle Farm; he whined about being out in the open, but I chose him because he’s the youngest and I wanted him well out of harm’s way if the dragon actually did put in an appearance. Seventy-five yards was about as far as I trusted the scorpion to shoot straight without having to make allowance for elevation—we didn’t have time to zero it, obviously—but it felt stupidly close. How long would it take the horrible thing to fly seventy-five yards? I had no idea, obviously. We spanned the scorpion—reassuringly hard to do—loaded Moddo’s idea of a bolt into the slider groove, nestled down as far as we could get into the briars and nettles, and waited.
No show. When it got too dark to see, Marhouse said, “What kind of poison do you think it’d take to kill something like that?”
I’d been thinking about that. “Something we haven’t got,” I said.
“You reckon?”
“Oh come on,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t keep a wide selection of poisons in the house. For some reason.”
“There’s archer’s root,” Ebba said.
“He’s right,” Marhouse said. “That stuff’ll kill just about anything.”
“Of course it will,” I replied. “But nobody around here—”
“Mercel,” Ebba said. “He’s got some.”
News to me. “What?”
“Mercel. Lidda’s boy. He uses it to kill wild pigs.”
Does he now? I thought. It had occurred to me that wild boar were getting a bit hard to find. I knew all about smearing a touch of archer’s root on a bit of jagged wire nailed to a fencepost—boar love to scratch, and it’s true, they do a lot of damage to standing corn. That’s why I pay compensation. Archer’s root is illegal, of course, but so are a lot of useful everyday commodities.
“I’d better ask him,” Ebba said. “He won’t want to get in any trouble.”
Decided unanimously, apparently. Well, we weren’t doing any good crouching in the bushes. It did cross my mind that if the dragon hadn’t noticed a dead goat with a trap under it, there was no guarantee it’d notice the same dead goat stuffed full of archer’s root, but I dismissed the idea as unconstructive.
We left the trap and the scorpion set up, just in case, and walked back to Castle Farm. To begin with, as we came over the top of the Hog’s Back down Castle Lane, I assumed the pretty red glow on the skyline was the last blush of the setting sun. As we got closer, I hoped that was what it was. By the time we passed the quince orchard, however, the hypothesis was no longer tenable.
We found Luitprand in the goose pond. Stupid fool, he’d jumped in the water to keep from getting burned up. Of course, the mud’s three feet deep on the bottom. I could have told him that.
In passing: I think Luitprand was my son. At any rate, I knew his mother rather too well, seventeen years ago. Couldn’t ever say anything, naturally. But he reminded me a lot of myself. For a start, he was half-smart stupid, just like me. Hurling myself in the pond to avoid the flames was just the sort of thing I might have done at his age; and, goes without saying, he wasn’t there when we dug the bloody pond, twenty-one years ago, so how could he have known we’d chosen the soft spot, no use for anything else?
No other casualties, thank God, but the hay barn, the straw rick, the woodpile, all gone. The thatch, miraculously, burnt itself out without taking the rafters with it. But losing that much hay meant we’d be killing a lot of perfectly good stock come winter, since I can’t afford to buy in. One damn thing after another.
Opito, Larcan’s wife, was hysterical, even though her home hadn’t gone in up flames after all. Larcan said it was a great big lizard, about twenty feet long. He got one very brief glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, just before he dragged his wife and son under the cart. He looked at me like it was all my fault. Just what I needed after a long day crouched in a briar patch.
Luitprand played the flute; not very well. I gave him the one I brought back from Outremer. I never did find it among his stuff, so I can only assume he sold it at some point.
ANYWAY, THAT WAS that, as far as I was concerned. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, it would have to be dealt with, as soon as possible. On the ride back from the farm, Marhouse had been banging on about flightlines again, where we were going to move the bait to; two days here, while the wind’s in the south, then if that’s no good, then another two days over there, and if that still doesn’t work, we’ll know for sure it must be following the line of the river, so either here, there, or just possibly everywhere, would be bound to do the trick, logically speaking. I smiled and nodded. I’m sure he was perfectly correct. He’s a good huntsman, Marhouse. Come the end of the season, he always knows exactly where all the game we’ve failed to find must be holed up. Next year, he then says—
Trouble was, there wasn’t time for a next year.
BY MIDNIGHT (COULDN’T sleep, oddly enough) I was fairly sure how it had to be done.
Before you start grinning to yourself at my presumption, I had no logical explanation for my conclusions. Flightlines, patterns of behaviour, life cycles, cover crops, mating seasons, wind directions; put them together and you’ll inevitably flush out the truth, which will then elude you, zig-zag running through the roots of the long variables. I knew.
I knew, because I used to hunt with my father. He was, of course, always in charge of everything, knew everything, excelled at everything. We never caught much. And I knew, when he’d drawn up the lines of beaters, given them their timings (say three Glorious Sun Ascendants and two Minor Catechisms, then come out making as much noise as you can), positioned the stillhunters and the hounds and the horsemen, finally blown the horn; I knew exactly where the wretched animal would come bursting out, so as to elude us all with the maximum of safety and the minimum of effort. Pure intuition, never failed. Naturally, I never said anything. Not my place to.
So: I knew what was going to happen, and that there was nothing much I could do about it, and my chances of success and survival were—well, not to worry about that. When I was in Outremer, I got shot in the face with an arrow. Should’ve killed me instantly; but by some miracle it hung up in my cheekbone, and an enemy doctor we’d captured the day before yanked it out with a pair of tongs. You should be dead, they said to me, like I’d deliberately cheated. No moral fibre. Ever since then—true, I shuddered to think how the estate would get on with my brother in charge, but it survived my father and grandfather, so it was clearly indestructible. Besides, everyone dies sooner or later. It’s not like I’m important.