Dragonsbane 9
still have sprung to his feet as he did. "Yes, of course.
I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?"
Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said,
"Yes. Yes, I know him."
She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse
and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said,
was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain
of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer
her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they
reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse
in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, "If—
if you're a witch, my lady, why couldn't you have fought
them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire
at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind..."
She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought
wryly—at least until he shouted.
But she only said, "Because I cannot."
"For reasons of honor?" he asked dubiously. "Because
there are some situations in which honor cannot apply..."
"No." She glanced sidelong at him through the aston-
ishing curtains of her loosened hair. "It is just that my
magic is not that strong."
And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing
into the vaporous shadows of the forest's bare, over-
hanging boughs.
Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the
admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms
with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius
in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had
ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it,
as she pretended now.
Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through
the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks
like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt
dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the
10 Barbara Hambly
woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves,
as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.
"Did you—did you see him slay the dragon?" Gareth
asked, after they had ridden in silence for some minutes.
"Would you tell me about it? Aversin is the only living
Dragonsbane—the only man who has slain a dragon. There
are ballads about him everywhere, about his courage and
his noble deeds... That's my hobby. Ballads, I mean, the
ballads of Dragonsbanes, like Selkythar the White back
in the reign of Ennyta the Good and Antara Warlady and
her brother, during the Kinwars. They say her brother
slew..." By the way he caught himself up Jenny guessed
he could have gone on about the great Dragonsbanes of
the past for hours, only someone had told him not to bore
people with the subject. "I've always wanted to see such
a thing—a true Dragonsbane—a glorious combat. His
renown must cover him like a golden mantle."
And, rather to her surprise, he broke into a light, wav-
ery tenor:
Riding up the hillside gleaming,
Like flame in the golden sunlight streaming;
Sword of steel strong in hand,
Wind-swift hooves spurning land,
Tall as an angel, stallion-strong,
Stem as a god, bright as song...
In the dragon's shadow the maidens wept,
Fair as lilies in darkness kept.
'I know him afar, so tall is he,
His plumes as bright as the rage of the sea,'
Spake she to her sister, 'fear no ill...'
Jenny looked away, feeling something twist inside inside
her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.
She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten
Dragonsbane 11
years ago the high-up flash of gold in the wan northern
sky, the plunge of fire and shadow, the boys and girls
screaming on the dancing floor at Great Toby. They were
memories she knew should have been tinted only with
horror; she was aware that she should have felt only glad-
ness at the dragon's death. But stronger than the horror,
the taste of nameless grief and desolation came back to
her from those times, with the metallic stench of the drag-
on's blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the sear-
ing air...
Her heart felt sick within her. Coolly, she said, "For
one thing, of the two children who were taken by the
dragon, John only managed to get the boy out alive. I
think the girl had been killed by the fames in the dragon's
lair. It was hard to tell from the state of the body. And if
she hadn't been dead, I still doubt they'd have been in
much condition to make speeches about how John looked,
even if he had come riding straight up the hill—which of
course he didn't."
"He didn't?" She could almost hear the shattering of
some image, nursed in the boy's mind.
"Of course not. If he had, he would have been killed
immediately."
"Then how..."
"The only way he could think of to deal with something
that big and that heavily armored. He had me brew the
most powerful poison that I knew of, and he dipped his
harpoons in that."
"PoisonT' Such foulness clearly pierced him to the
heart. "Harpoons? Not a sword at all?"
Jenny shook her head, not knowing whether to feel
amusement at the boy's disappointed expression, exas-
peration at the way he spoke of what had been for her
and hundreds of others a time of sleepless, nightmare
horror, or only a kind of elder-sisterly compassion for the
naivete that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade
12 Barbara Humbly
against twenty-five feet of spiked and flaming death. "No,"
she only said, "John came at it from the overhang of the
gully in which it was laired—it wasn't a cave, by the way;
there are no caves that large in these hills. He slashed its
wings first, so that it couldn't take to the air and fall on
him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it
down, but he finished it off with an ax."
"An ax?!" Gareth cried, utterly aghast. "That's—that's
the most horrible thing I've ever heard! Where is the glory
in that? Where is the honor? It's like hamstringing your
opponent in a duel! It's cheating!"
"He wasn't fighting a duel," Jenny pointed out. "If a
dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost."
"But it's dishonorable!" the boy insisted passionately,
as if that were some kind of clinching argument.
"It might have been, had he been fighting a man who
had honorably challenged him—something John has never
been known to do in his life. Even fighting bandits, it pays
to strike from behind when one is outnumbered. As the
only representative of the King's law in these lands, John
generally is outnumbered. A dragon is upward oftweJity
feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail.
You said yourself," she added with a smile, "that there
are situations in which honor does not
apply."
"But that's different!" the boy said miserably and lapsed
into disillusioned silence.
The ground beneath the horses' feet was rising; the
vague walls of the misty tunnel through which they rode
were ending. Beyond, the silvery shapes of the round-
backed hills could be dimly seen. As they came clear of
the trees, the winds fell upon them, clearing the mists and
nipping their clothes and faces like ill-trained dogs. Shak-
ing the blowing handfuls of her hair out other eyes. Jenny
got a look at Gareth's face as he gazed about him at the
moors. It wore a look of shock, disappointment, and puz-
Dragonsbane
13
Scale and Structure of a Dragon
(From John Aversin's notes)
1) Mane structure and spikes at joints are thicker than
shown. A bone "shield" extends from the back of the
skull beneath the mane to protect the nape of the
neck.
2) Golden Dragon ofWyr measured approx. 27' of which
12' was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than
50'
14 Barbara Hambly
zlement, as if he had never thought to find his hero in this
bleak and trackless world of moss, water, and stone.
As for Jenny, this barren world stirred her strangely.
The moors stretched nearly a hundred miles, north to the
ice-locked shores of the ocean; she knew every break in
the granite landscape, every black peat-beck and every
hollow where the heather grew thick in the short highlands
summers; she had traced the tracks of hare and fox and
kitmouse in three decades of winter snows. Old Caerdinn,
half-mad through poring over books and legends of the
days of the Kings, could remember the time when the
Kings had withdrawn their troops and their protection
from the Winteriands to fight the wars for the lordship of
the south; he had grown angry with her when she had
spoken of the beauty she found in those wild, silvery
fastnesses of rock and wind. But sometimes his bitterness
stirred in Jenny, when she worked to save the life of an
ailing village child whose illness lay beyond her small
skills and there was nothing in any book she had read that
might tell her how to save that life; or when the Iceriders
came raiding down over the floe-ice in the brutal winters,
burning the barns that cost such labor to raise, and slaugh-
tering the cattle that could only be bred up from such
meager stock. However, her own lack of power had taught
her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties
and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.
It was nothing she could have explained; not to Caerdinn,
nor to this boy, nor to anyone else.
At length she said softly, "John would never have gone
after the dragon, Gareth, had he not been forced to it.
But as Thane of Alyn Hold, as Lord of Wyr, he is the
only man in the Winteriands trained to and living by the
arts of war. It is for this that he is the lord. He fought
the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin
which was harming his people. He had no choice."
"But a dragon isn't vermin!" Gareth protested. "It is
Dragonsbane 15
the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the man-
hood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn't
have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can't have!"
There was a desperation to believe in his voice that
made Jenny glance over at him curiously. "No," she agreed.
"A dragon isn't vermin. And this one was truly beautiful."
Her voice softened at the recollection, even through the
horror-haze of death and fear, of its angular, alien splen-
dor. "Not golden, as your song calls it, but a sort of amber,
grading to brownish smoke along its back and ivory upon
its belly. The patterns of the scales on its sides were like
the beadwork on a pair of slippers, like woven irises, all
shades of purple and blue. Its head was like a flower, too;
its eyes and maw were surrounded with scales like colored
ribbons, with purple homs and tufts of white and black
far, and with antennae like a crayfish's tipped with bobs
of gems. It was butcher's work to slay it."
They rounded the shoulder of a tor. Below them, like
a break in the cold granite landscape, spread a broken
line of brown fields where the mists lay like stringers of
dirty wool among the stubble of harvest. A little farther
along the track lay a hamlet, disordered and trashy under
a bluish smear of woodsmoke, and the stench of the place
rose on the whipping ice-winds: the lye-sting of soap being
boiled; an almost-visible murk of human and animal waste;
the rotted, nauseating sweetness of brewing beer. The
barking of dogs rose to them like churchbells in the air.
In the midst of it all a stumpy tower stood, the tumble-
down remnant of some larger fortification.
"No," said Jenny softly, "the dragon was a beautiful
creature, Gareth. But so was the girl it carried away to
its lair and killed. She was fifteen—John wouldn't let her
parents see the remains."
She touched her heels to Moon Horse's sides and led
the way down the damp clay of the track.
* *
16 Barbara HamUy
"Is this village where you live?" Gareth asked, as they
drew near the walls.
Jenny shook her head, drawing her mind back from
the bitter and confusing tangle of the memories of the
slaying of the dragon. "I have my own house about six
miles from here, on Frost Fell—I live there alone. My
magic is not great; it needs silence and solitude for its
study." She added wryly, "Though I don't have much of
either. I am midwife and healer for all of Lord Aversin's
lands."
"Will—will we reach his lands soon?"
His voice sounded unsteady, and Jenny, regarding him
worriedly, saw how white he looked and how, in spite of
the cold, sweat ran down his hollow cheeks with their
faint fuzz of gold. A little surprised at his question, she
said, "These are Lord Aversin's lands."
He raised his head to look at her, shocked. "These?"
He stared around him at the muddy fields, the peasants
shouting to one another as they shocked up the last of
the corn, the ice-scummed waters of the moat that girdled
the rubble fill and fieldstone patches of the shabby wall.
"Then—that is one of Lord Aversin's villages?"
"That," Jenny said matter-of-factly as the hooves of
their horses rumbled hollowly on the wood of the draw-
bridge, "is Alyn Hold."
The town huddled within the curtain wall—a wall built
by the present lord's grandfather, old James Standfast, as
a temporary measure and now hoary with fifty winters—
was squalid beyond description. Through the archway
beneath the squat gatehouse untidy houses were visible,
clustered around the wall of the Hold itself as if the larger
building had seeded them, l
ow-built of stone and rubble
upon the foundations of older walls, thatched with river
reed-straw and grubby with age. From the window-turret
of the gatehouse old Peg the gatekeeper stuck her head
out, her long, gray-streaked brown braids hanging down
Dragonsbane 17
like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she caned out to
Jenny, "You're in luck," in the glottal lilt of the north-
country speech. "Me lord got in last night from ridin' the
bounds. He'll be about."
"She wasn't—was she talking about Lord Aversin?"
Gareth whispered, scandalized.
Jenny's crescent-shaped eyebrows quirked upward.
"He's the only lord we have."
"Oh." He bunked, making another mental readjust-
ment. "'Riding the bounds'?"
"The bounds of his lands. He patrols them, most days
of the month, he and militia volunteers." Seeing Gareth's
face fall, she added gently, "That is what it is to be a
lord."
"It isn't, you know," Gareth said. "It is chivalry, and
honor, and..." But she had already ridden past him, out
of the slaty darkness of the gatehouse passage and into
the heatless sunlight of the square.
With all its noise and gossipy squalor, Jenny had always
liked the village of Alyn. It had been the home of her
childhood; the stone cottage in which she had been born
and in which her sister and brother-in-law still lived—
though her sister's husband discouraged mention of the