“Yi-yi-yi!” wailed Hugi. “’Tis roasted we’ll be!”
Downward the monster slanted, overhauling them with nightmare speed. Holger glanced back again and saw flame and smoke roll from the fanged mouth. For a lunatic moment he wondered about the metabolism; and what amendment to the square-cube law permitted that hulk to fly? A whiff of sulfur dioxide stabbed his nostrils.
“Look yonder!” Alianora’s cry drifted down the slope. He gazed the way she pointed and saw a narrow cave mouth in a nearby cliff. “He canna follow us in there!”
“No!” bellowed Holger. “Keep out of that! It’s death!”
She cast him a frightened glance, but obediently urged the unicorn away from the cave. Holger felt the first billow of heat on his back. Ye gods, if they went to earth in that hole, the dragon could suffocate them with six puffs.
“We’ve got to find water!” he bawled.
Up and over the stony land they fled, while the thresh of wings and the rumble of flames grew louder. Holger drew his sword. But what chance would he have? The dragon could grill him in his hauberk.
Well , he thought, I may win a chance for Alianora to get clear.
He didn’t stop to reason out why he must find water. There was only time to flee, over the hills, along a precipice edge, down a gorge. Papillon screamed as fire touched him.
Then they burst through a screen of brush, and a river ran below them, green and swift and thirty feet wide. The unicorn plunged in. Spray sheeted about the spiral horn. Papillon followed. They stopped in midstream. The river was icy cold, daggers in their feet.
The dragon landed on the bank. It arched its back and hissed like an angry locomotive. Afraid of water, Holger realized. So that was what his intuition had known.
“’Twill fly above, snatch us into the air,” gasped Alianora.
“Get down, then!” Holger leaped to the pebbly streambed. The current swirled strong around his chest. Hugi and Alianora clung to the tails of their respective mounts. “When the attack comes, duck below the surface,” Holger commanded.
But no human could stay down long enough. They were done.
Yeah, done to a turn.
The dragon flapped clumsily aloft. Its shadow fell on them as it hovered against the sun. Slowly, it descended. Flame gushed ahead, out of the open jaws.
Flame! Holger sheathed his sword, snatched off his helmet, and scooped it full of water. The dragon rushed down. He threw up one arm to protect his eyes. Blindly, he sloshed.
Steam burst around him. The dragon bellowed, nearly splitting his eardrums. The scaled bulk wobbled in flight, long neck dashing to and fro, tail churning the stream. Holger cursed and threw another helmetful of water at its snout.
The dragon stunned him with a shriek. Slowly and painfully, it rose in the air and flew back south. They heard its clamor for a long while.
The breath sobbed into Holger’s lungs. He stood motionless, exhausted, till the beast was out of sight. Finally hd led the others back to shore.
“Holger, Holger!” Alianora clung to him, trembled and wept and laughed.
“How’d ye do it? How’d ye conquer him, best o’ knichts, darling, my jo?”
“Oh, well. That.” Holger felt his face gingerly. He’d gotten several blisters. “A little thermodynamics is all.”
“What manner o’ magic be that?” she asked with reverence.
“Not magic. Look, if the creature breathed fire, then it had to be even hotter inside. So I tossed half a gallon of water down its gullet. Caused a small boiler explosion.” Holger waved his hand with elaborate casualness. “Nothing to it.”
11
A FEW MILES farther on they entered a hollow sheltered by cliff walls, as mild and sunny as any lowland. Beech and poplar rustled above long grass full of primroses, a brook tinkled, a flock of starlings fluttered off. The place seemed ideal for a rest such as they and the mounts badly needed.
After a defensive circle was constructed, Alianora yawned—she could do even that quite charmingly—and curled up to sleep. Hugi sat down below the cross, whittling with his new knife. Holger felt restless. “I think I’ll take a look around,” he said. “Call me if anything goes wrong.”
“Is ’t safe to gang off alane?” said the dwarf. He answered himself: “Aye, o’ coorse ’tis. What can harm a drakeslayer?”
Holger blushed. He was the man of the hour, but knew much too well what a series of accidents had caused that. “I won’t go far.”
He got his pipe lighted and strolled off, jingling a bit. The scene was utterly peacefuclass="underline" meadow, flowers, trees, water, Papillon and the unicorn cropping, the liquid notes of a thrush. Except for the smart of his burns, he could easily have sat down, blotted up sunshine, and considered Alianora. But no. He wrenched his mind away. He had some heavier thinking to do.
Let’s admit it, he was a crucial figure, or at least an important one, in this Carolingian world. In view of everything that had happened, it must be more than coincidence that Papillon, preternaturally strong and intelligent, should have been waiting exactly where he appeared, with clothes and arms that exactly fitted his own outsize frame. Then there was the excitement he had caused in Faerie, and the curious fact that despite his ignorance they had not been able to kill him... Well, there had been a Charlemagne in both worlds. Maybe he himself was also, somehow, doubled. But then who was he? And why, and how?
He lost sight of the camp as he wandered on, trying to fit what he had learned into a pattern. This business of Chaos versus Law, for example, turned out to be more than religious dogma. It was a practical fact of existence, here. He was reminded of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of the physical universe toward disorder and level entropy. Perhaps here, that tendency found a more... animistic... expression. Or, wait a minute, didn’t it in his own world too? What had he been fighting when he fought the Nazis but a resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely dead?
In this universe the wild folk of the Middle World might be trying to break down a corresponding painfully established order: to restore some primeval state where anything could happen. Decent humanity would, on the other hand, always want to strengthen and extend Law, safety, predictability. Therefore Christianity, Judaism, even Mohammedanism frowned on witchcraft, that was more allied to Chaos than to orderly physical nature. Though to be sure, science had its perversions, while magic had its laws. A definite ritual was needed in either case, whether you built an airplane or a flying carpet. Gerd had mentioned something about the impersonal character of the supernatural. Yes, that was why Roland had tried to break Durindal, in his last hour at Roncesvalles: so the miraculous sword would not fall into paynim hands...
The symmetry was suggestive. In Holger’s home world, physical forces were strong and well understood, mental-magical forces weak and unmanageable. In this universe the opposite held true. Both worlds were, in some obscure way, one; the endless struggle between Law and Chaos had reached a simultaneous climax in them. As for the force which made them so parallel, the ultimate oneness itself, he supposed he would have to break down and call it God. But he lacked a theological bent of mind. He’d rather stick to what he had directly observed, and to immediate practical problems. Such as his own reason for being here.
But that continued to elude him. He remembered a life in the other world, from childhood to a certain moment on the beach near Kronborg. Somehow he had had another life too, but he didn’t know where or when. Those memories had been stolen. No, rather, they had been forced back into his subconscious, and only under unusual stimuli did they return.