“Now, please, Big,” the man said, in a hoarse whisper; “don’t make no noises. Listen to what I got to tell ya, huh.”
Jon-Joras nodded. “Doghunter,” he said, pleased with himself at having made this out.
The man didn’t bother to affirm or deny his class. “They want to kill ya,” he said. “You know who I mean. The bigs. The gents. Before the king gets here. Your—”
“My king?” He struggled against the sweet mists of indifference to understand.
“King… King Paul? He gets here tomorrow. And I can tell you — they’re not going to wait. You stay here, you’ll be dead by then, huh.”
Jon-Joras swung his legs over the side, feeling the railings cold to his flesh. “I won’t wait,” he said. “I have to see him. I’ll go…”
He paused. Go where? Where would he be safe. The man in the darkness thumped his chest. “Go with me,” he offered. “We’ll see you safe. I won’t mention no name, but you know who I mean. Him: tall. Her: young. With me.”
Jon-Joras nodded. Hue and Lora. Naturally they’d want him kept safe — now. If he were to be killed before he could talk, tell of what he knew, they’d have to begin from scratch, find some other safe and far-off den to bring their dragons to and train them there. “I’ll go with you. Just lead me. Just lead.”
The corridors were filled with soft darkness here and there spotted with tiny small lights. A thin thread of very quiet music seeped from hidden speakers. The man was a big man, but he moved silently. It could have been no more than a pair of minutes before he had found a stairwell which led them soon to the cool and safety of the darkness without.
A long while afterwards he reached to grasp the man’s shoulder. “Someone’s behind us,” he whispered.
The man mumbled something, Jon-Joras could not clearly hear the words, but clearly he was neither surprised nor concerned. They kept on going. And by and by a door opened so suddenly that his eyes received the unexpected light almost like a blow. A voice inside was muttering, “—still say the Bosky would be—” It fell suddenly silent. His guide turned and took him by the hand to draw him in. Perhaps Jon-Joras’s light-struck eyes made him hesitate, perhaps they noted nonetheless a sudden change in the man’s expression. However it was, he hesitated, drew back. The hand on his wrist tightened, pulled.
There was not one person who had been behind them in the night, there were three. Jon-Joras not only went in, he went down. The door closed upon his astonished cries.
“I should have killed you when you were on my own grounds,” Aëlorix said. “And buried you beneath the dung of the deer-barn.” His mouth arched like a bow, down at the corners.
Feeling dazed, dull, stupid, Jon-Joras said, “But I saw your son die. He died in my arms. He—”
“He died, at least, with honor. Sooner or later one way or the other, every man meets his dragon. His was a dirty one — a rogue. A man-made rogue!” The aristocrat’s voice clicked in his throat, his face showed a disgust greater than grief or rage.
Protesting, bewildered, “But I had nothing to do with that,” Jon-Joras cried. “I might have been killed there myself. I don’t understand. I don’t understand!” His anguished gaze took in the rough-looking man who had brought him there and his rougher-looking fellows. “And I certainly don’t — You! You are not of the Gentlemen! Why are you doing this?”
The guide gave a short laugh. “Ah, you thought you was so clever, huh. ‘Doghunter,’ you said to me. That’s just one of your mistakes. I’m not a Doghunter, huh, any more than I’m a Gentleman. Maybe you don’t know everything about this place after all. So I’ll tell a few things, make it all clear. What’s it that the old nut-head who digs in ruins calls us? ‘Plebs’? So we’re plebs, huh. But that don’t make us Dog-hunters! Or what’s it they like to call themselves, ‘free farmers,’ we don’t want no farms, dig potatoes, all that. Nah…”
In small mood to appreciate the rude logic of what he heard, Jon-Joras listened nevertheless. It did make sense. Many of the plebs gave full approval to the Hunt system. They did so because of the employment it gave, the trade it brought, the color it afforded their otherwise drab days; they did so from simple habit, too, and also because they held themselves to be superior to the Doghunters — who opposed it. And because it allied them, thus, to the Gentlemen, whom they envied — and with whom, thus, they identified.
It was that complex. And that simple.
In vain Jon-Joras pointed out that to expose the outlaws’ program of mis-marking dragon-chicks and of training some of those thus disfigured to be rogues, must inevitably result — one way or another — in the destruction of the outlaws’ program. Uselessly he declared that he himself was taking no sides, that Hue’s people had captured him once and subsequently tried to have him murdered.
To the first plea Aëlorix said only, grimly, “We know how to take care of that ourselves.” And to the second, “Too bad they didn’t succeed.” Adding, “But we will…”
Why? Why?
But the questions were based on the assumption that reason and fair-play prevailed, and in this situation neither did. The outlaws now wished their outlawry revealed and Jon-Joras had agreed to reveal it. Therefore he was doing their bidding. Therefore he was on their side. Therefore he had made himself the target of the full rage of the Gentlemen and their jackals.
More — When Aëlorix said that he was not dependent on the Hunt Company, he spoke only in the most economic, limited sense. Every single Gentleman was dependent on the Company because the Hunt System was dependent on the outworld trade and the Gentlemen, as a class, were dependent on the System. Even such finite freedom as Aëlorix himself possessed was the exception.
“Do you think I don’t know you for what you are?” he asked, scornfully. “Outworlders? — cowards — the lot of you. One hint of danger, you’d never show yourselves on Earth again. And then what? Grub in the dirt—us? — like Dog-hunters’ brats?”
Then, as he paused, over the sound of his heavy breathing, another sound came in from the night… low. Low, troubled, melancholy… the cry of a questing dragon. Almost for the first time there came to Jon-Joras’s mind, preoccupied as it was with his own fears and his troubles, some thought of dragon qua dragon — poor beast! predestined to torture, agony, death for another species’ sport — when all it wanted was to find a mate, to couple as nature intended it, off there in the cool and ferny darkness.
The eyes of master and men swung in the direction of the cry, then; rested briefly, swung back to the prisoner; met each other. Whatever thoughts were theirs, pity was not one of them. The erstwhile guide began to grin.
“There it is,” he said.
Aëlorix nodded. Jon-Joras felt his flesh prickle. “What—” he began.
“‘Sooner or later,’” Aëlorix quoted himself, “‘one way or the other, every man meets his dragon.’
“Hear it? That’s yours.”
X
Aëlorix’s final words to his prisoner and former guest were never finished, but did not need to be. “Why you should live, and he be dead—” the man said; his face twisted with grief and hate and he turned away. It was the age-old cry of Why me and not another? and in his bitterness and his rage, fed from a hundred springs, somehow he blamed Jon-Joras for his own son’s death.
It was the time between dawn and earliest morning. Mostly the sky was gray, but the mist to eastwards had begun to show pink. All was quiet, all was cool, as they took him from the small house in the woods. The Gentleman himself said nothing more after that, but his lowborn thugs cursed and muttered and hawked and spat and complained of the chill. Dew still trickled and fell upon them, going down the barely visible path.