"If ye'll pardon me, sir," said Jillo, "that were no knightly way to speak. It becomes not your station."
"Well, to the nethermost hells with my station, too! Wherever these paladins go, they find damsels in distress to rescue or have other agreeable, thrilling, and sanitary adventures. What adventures have we had? The time we fled from robbers in the Turonian Forest. The time I fished you out of the Albis half drowned. The time we ran out of food in the Asciburgi Mountains and had to plod fodderless over those hair-raising peaks for three days on empty stomachs."
"The Divine Pair do but seek to try the mettle of a valorous aspirant knight, sir. Ye should welcome these petty adversities as a chance to prove your manhood."
Eudoric made a rude noise with his mouth. "That for my manhood! Right now, I'd fainer have a stout roof overhead, a warm fire before me, and a hot repast in my belly. If ever I go on such a silly jaunt again, I'll find one of those verse-mongers—like that troubadour, Landwin of Kromnitch, who visited us yesteryear—and drag him along, to show him how little real adventures resemble those of romances. And if he fall into the Albis, he may drown for all of me. Were it not for my darling Lusina ..."
Eudoric lapsed into gloomy silence, punctuated by sneezes.
They plodded on until they came to the village of Liptai, on the border of Pathenia. After the border guards had questioned and passed them, they walked their animals down the bottomless mud of the principal street. Most of the slatternly houses were made of logs or of crudely hewn planks, innocent of paint.
"Heaven above!" said Jillo. "Look at that, sir!"
"That" was a gigantic snail shell, converted into a small house.
"Knew you not of the giant snails of Pathenia?" asked Eudoric. "I've read of them in Doctor Baldonius' encyclopedia. When fullgrown, they—or rather their shells—are ofttimes used for dwellings in this land."
Jillo shook his head. " 'Twere better, had ye spent more of your time on your knightly exercises and less on reading. Your sire hath never learnt his letters, yet he doth his duties well enow."
"Times change, Jillo. I may not have the learning of Doctor Baldonius, or clang rhymes so featly as that ass Landwin of Kromnitch; but in these days a stroke of the pen were oft more fell than the slash of a sword. Here's a hostelry that look not too slummocky. Do you dismount and inquire concerning their tallage."
"Why me, sir?"
"Because I am fain to know, ere we put our necks in the noose! Go ahead. If I go in, they'll double the scot at the sight of me."
When Jillo came out and quoted prices, Eudoric said: "Too dear. We'll try the other."
"But, Master! Mean ye to put us in some flea-bitten hovel, like that which we suffered in Bitavia?"
"Aye. Did you not prate to me on the virtues of petty adversity, to strengthen one's knightly mettle?"
" 'Tis not that, sir."
"What, then?" asked Eudoric.
"Why, when better quarters are to be had, to make do with the worse were an insult to your rank and station. No gentleman—"
"Here we are!" said Eudoric. "Suitably squalid, too! You see, good Jillo, I did but yestereven count our money, and lo! more than half is gone, and our journey not yet half completed."
"But, noble Master! No man of knightly mettle would so debase himself as to tally his silver, like some base-born commercial—"
"Then I must needs lack true knightly mettle."
For a dozen leagues beyond Liptai rose the great, tenebrous Motolian Forest. Beyond the forest lay the provincial capital of Velitchovo. Beyond Velitchovo, the forest thinned out gradatim to the great grassy plains of Pathenia. Beyond Pathenia, Eudoric had been told, stretched the boundless deserts of Pantorozia, over which a man might ride for months without seeing a city.
Yes, the innkeeper told him, there were plenty of dragons in the Motolian Forest. "But fear them not," said Kasmar in broken Helladic. "From being hunted, they have become wary and even timid. An ye stick to the road and move yarely, they'll pester you not unless ye surprise or corner one."
"Have any dragons been devouring maidens fair of late?" asked Eudoric.
Kasmar laughed. "Nay, good Master. What did maidens fair, traipsing round the woods to stir up the beasties? Leave them be, I say, and they do the same by you."
A cautious instinct warned Eudoric not to speak of his quest. Two days later, after he and Jillo had rested and renewed their equipment, they set out into the forest. For a league they followed the Velitchovo road. Then Eudoric, accoutered in full plate and riding Morgrim, led his companion off the road and into the woods to southward. They threaded their way among the trees, ducking branches, in a wide detour. Guided by the sun, Eudoric brought them back to the road near Liptai.
The next day they did the same, except that their circuit curved off to the north of the highway.
After three more days of this exploration, Jillo became restless. "Good Master, what do we, circling round and about so bootlessly? The dragons do dwell farther east, away from the haunts of men, they say."
"Having once been lost in the woods," said Eudoric, "I would not repeat the experience. Therefore do we scout our field of action, like a general scouting a future battlefield."
" 'Tis an arid business," said Jillo with a shrug. "But then, ye were always one to see further into a millstone than most."
At last, having committed the nearer byways of the forest to memory, Eudoric led Jillo farther east. After casting about, they came at last upon the unmistakable tracks of a dragon. The animal had beaten a path through the brush, along which they could ride about as well as on the road. When they had followed the track for above an hour, Eudoric became aware of a pungent, musky stench.
"My lance, Jillo!" said Eudoric, trying to keep his voice from rising with nervousness.
The next bend in the path brought them into full view of the dragon, a thirty-footer facing them on the trail.
"Ha!" said Eudoric. "Meseems 'tis a mere cockadrill, albeit longer of neck and of limb than those that dwell in the rivers of Agisymba—if the pictures in Doctor Baldonius' books deceive me not. Have at thee, vile worm!"
Eudoric couched his lance and put spurs to Morgrim. The destrier bounded ponderously forward.
The dragon raised its head and peered this wsy and that, as if it could not see very well. As the hoofbeats drew nearer, the dragon opened its jaws and uttered a loud, hoarse, groaning bellow.
At that, Morgrim checked his rush with stiffened forelegs, spun cumbrously on his haunches, and veered off the trail into the woods. Jillo's palfrey bolted likewise, but in another direction. The dragon set out after Eudoric at a shambling trot.
Eudoric had not gone fifty yards when Morgrim passed close by a massive old oak, a thick-girthed limb of which jutted into their path. The horse ducked beneath the bough. The branch caught Eudoric across the breastplate, flipped him backwards over the can-tie of his saddle, and swept him to earth with a clatter.
Half stunned, he saw the dragon trot closer and closer—and then lumber past him, almost within touching distance, to disappear on the trail of the fleeing horse. The next that Eudoric knew, Jillo was bending over him, crying:
"Wellaway, my poor heroic master! Be any bones broken, sir?"
"All of them, methinks," groaned Eudoric. "What's befallen Morgrim?"
"That I know not. And look at this dreadful dent in your beauteous cuirass!"
"Help me out of the thing. The dent pokes most sorely into my ribs. The misadventures I suffer for my dear Lusina!"
"We must get your breastplate to a smith, to have it hammered out and filed smooth."