"The hall, Gorbash!" cried Aragh. Jim looked, between the pikeheads that came flashing at him suddenly with renewed vigor. The main doors of the hall were opening; and slowly, as he watched, a ponderous figure all in mirror-bright armor, already mounted with long lance in one gauntleted hand, rode out through the opening.
The armored figure did not appear to be in a hurry. It rode out into the center of the courtyard, turned its head in the direction of the wolf, looked toward Jim, then put its horse into a leisurely trot and rode—not at either one, but out of the castle gate.
Howls of reproach and anger replaced the shouts of triumph of the men-at-arms. They retreated from Jim and Aragh. Some dropped weapons and tried to run. Aragh was immediately upon those who ran from him, bringing them down from behind; but Jim ignored the men-at-arms falling away from him.
"You clean up here, Aragh!" he roared at the wolf. The feeling of unmatchable power was blazing in him now, and he could not wait to close with the mounted figure he had just seen. "I'll go get him!"
"No! Stay! Hold, Sir James—!" It was another fully armored figure, shouting, bursting out of the same exit from the keep that Jim had used. Brian, fully dressed and weaponed at last, ran heavily toward the stables, where horses still neighed and pulled at their tethers, upset by the excitement around them.
"Too late!" Jim thundered, joyously. "I spoke for him first!"
He took to his wings, lifting up and over the wall. Outside, the armored figure on the horse was already three-quarters of the way to the forest edge.
"Surrender, Sir Hugh!" shouted Jim at full volume. "I'll get you, anyway!"
He had expected the escaping knight, particularly after showing he was the kind to leave his men to die while he saved himself, to do nothing but put his heavy roan into a panic-stricken gallop at the sound of a dragon-voice and the sight of dragon-wings swooping after him. To Jim's surprise, however, Sir Hugh pulled his steed to a stop, turned and lowered his lance to attack position. Then he broke the horse into a run, charging directly for Jim.
Jim almost laughed. The man had lost his head. Either that, or else he had faced the fact that defeat and death were inescapable and had decided to go down fighting. At the same time, it was odd; and Jim had a sudden, reasonless memory flash of Smrgol, demanding of the other dragons in the cave: "How many of you here would like to face just a single george in his shell, with his horn aimed at you?"
Then he and Sir Hugh came together with a crash, an unbelievable impact that in one blinding, pain-shot moment blotted out sight, thought, memory and all else…
Chapter Seventeen
"My boy…" said Smrgol's voice, brokenly. "My boy…"
It had seemed a very long time now that Jim had been conscious of shapes moving around him, of alternate periods of light and darkness, of voices that came and went… voices familiar and voices strange. But he had paid little attention to them, lost as he was on a sea of pain which sucked him down, now and again, into dark waters of unconsciousness, then let him return partway to reality. The pain had become the whole world to him lately. It filled his mind completely. It dissolved his body in sensation. No one part of him suffered; it was his total being. And this situation had continued and continued…
But now, with his identification of Smrgol's voice, the waters of the pain-ocean receded a little. The reduction in discomfort made him feel almost comfortable—almost luxurious. What pain remained was like an old disability, grown into a companion over the years, something that would be missed if it were suddenly to disappear altogether. He tried to focus his eyes on the large, shadowy shape near him.
"Smrgol… ?" he asked.
The voice that came from his throat was a ghost-voice, a wraith of that dragon-resonance with which he had become familiar since he had first awakened on this different world in Gorbash's body.
"He spoke to me!" It was Smrgol. "Praise to the Fires! He'll live! Wolf, call the others! Tell them he's going to live, after all. Tell them to come, quickly!"
"I'll go," snarled the voice of Aragh. "But I said he would. Didn't I say he would?"
"Yes, yes…" Smrgol's voice was throaty. "But I'm an old dragon; and I've seen so many go down before those horns of the georges… Gorbash, how do you feel? Can you talk… ?"
"A little…" Jim whispered. "What happened?"
"You were an idiot, boy, that's what happened!" Smrgol was trying to sound stern and was not succeeding very well. "What gave you the wild idea you could take on a shelled george—one on a horse at that—single-handed?"
"I mean," husked Jim, "what happened to me?"
"You got a horn—a lance, they call it—through you, that's what happened. Anyone but a dragon would've been dead by the time he hit the ground. Anyone but one of our branch of the family would've died within the hour. As it is, it's been eight days now with you teetering on the edge; but now that you're back enough to answer me, it'll be all right. You'll live. A dragon that's not killed outright survives—that's the way we are, boy!"
"Survives…" echoed Jim. The word had a strange sound in his ears.
"Of course! As I say, that's the way we are. Three more days and you'll be on your feet. A couple of days after that and you'll be the same as ever!"
"No," said Jim, "not the same…"
"What're you talking about? Nonsense! I say you'll be as good as ever, and you will! Don't argue with me, now. I say you will!"
The old dragon went on talking, but Jim found his mind slipping back into dark waters once more. He would not argue with Smrgol. There was no point to it. But that did not mean he was allowing the old dragon to convince him. There was a change in him now; and he would never be the same again.
That recognition of a change stayed with him in the days that followed. As Smrgol predicted, he mended rapidly; and as he mended he began to respond to the visitors coming to see him. From them he slowly pieced together what had happened to him since that second in which he and Sir Hugh had crashed together outside the castle walls.
He understood now why the dragons, magnificent animals as they were, were still correct in fearing an armored knight, particularly one on horseback and armed with a lance. Over a ton of horse, man and metal—moving at speed of better than ten miles an hour with all that mass concentrated on the sharp point of a sixteen-foot shaft—gave awesome penetrating power. In Jim's case the lance had missed his heart and both lungs, or even Gorbash's constitution could not have saved him. The point of the weapon had entered high on his chest where the massive pectoral muscle of the left wing was not thick, and gone clear through him to emerge beside the left scapular with about eight inches of point and shaft. In addition, the back twelve feet of the lance had broken off, leaving a short stub of thicker shaft protruding from the entry point in his chest.
At first, the others had thought him dead. Certainly Hugh de Bois had thought so; for, without waiting to make sure, he had climbed back on his horse—which had gone down in the collision—and ridden off before he could be chased and caught by Brian on one of the castle horses.
The others had gathered around Jim on the plain, where he lay unmoving; and it had been Aragh who had first established that he still breathed, if only barely. They had not dared move him, as he was clearly on the very precipice edge of extinction. So they had built a makeshift hut of poles and branches over him where he lay, covered him with cloths and built a fire within the shelter to keep him warm while the wolf went for S. Carolinus.
Carolinus had come, accompanied by Smrgol, to whom he had somehow gotten word. At the magician's direction, the old dragon had used his strength to do what the others had seen no way of doing, even if they had been willing to risk it. Smrgol had carefully drawn out the broken shaft.
With the wound cleared, Jim had bled heavily for a while, but eventually the bleeding had stopped; and Carolinus had announced that since Jim had survived so far, nothing more was to be done for him. The magician had made ready to leave.
"But there must be s
omething we can do!" Danielle insisted.
"Wait," snapped Carolinus, "and hope."
He left.
They built the hut into a more permanent structure. Smrgol and Aragh took turns sitting with him, occasionally with Danielle, Brian, or one of the other humans for company; and they waited. Finally the day had now come on which he answered Smrgol.
Now, all were coming around to talk to him and convey their satisfaction that he had survived. Each of them had an individual way of doing this: Smrgol lectured him. Aragh growled sourly at him. Danielle insisted that he had been stupid, but thought at the same time that it was rather princely of him to hurl himself to almost-certain death; she was briskly unsympathetic, but very gentle in changing his bandages, which she would not allow anyone else to touch. Giles was curious as to the style of fighting Sir James had known in his proper body, and came close to hinting that Jim must have had some secret ploy up his sleeve or he would not have risked making a frontal attack on Sir Hugh in the first place. Dafydd came and sat and worked at his fletcher's craft of arrow-making, and said nothing.
Geronde de Chaney (who had been the girl in white, with the pike, in the keep) came by and promised him revenge. She wore a bandage herself on her right cheek.
It appeared that Sir Hugh had originally ridden up with a half-dozen followers and obtained entrance to the castle by saying he had word of her father's death. Once inside, the men with him had overpowered the gate guards and let in the rest of his retainers. With the castle in his hands, he had admitted he knew nothing about her father; but since he intended to have Malvern, he told her he expected her to marry him immediately. When she refused, he had threatened to disfigure her in stages by slashing first her right cheek, then three days later her left, then three days after that by cutting off her nose, then by putting out her eyes one at a time until she gave in. She had, defied him and now would carry the scar on one cheek for the rest of her life. She was a frail, rather ethereal-looking maiden with ash-blond hair and detailed plans for cooking Sir Hugh over a slow fire as soon as she could make him her prisoner.
Brian brought wine and sat and drank with Jim, telling his bad jokes and endless stories, some of which were apparently true—according to Aragh or Smrgol—but all of which were incredible.
Dick Innkeeper sent the last of his hams to tickle Jim's appetite.
Actually, Jim found that for the first time in his dragon-body appetite was missing. The wine was pleasant on his throat; but even that did not tempt him except in what, for a dragon, were very small quantities.
Nevertheless, he mended. He took to sitting outside in the sun, and the clear, bright light of early autumn warmed his body even if it did not touch the inner coldness that had come to swell in him. The truth was that Death, in the shape of Sir Hugh's lance, had come too close. The broken spear was out of his body now and most of the pain was gone, but there was still a low-level general interior ache that stayed with him and nourished a bleakness of spirit. The color had gone out of things, the uniqueness and value out of the people about him. Even the thought of Angie dwindled in importance. His mind held only one overriding thought: he would never attack an armored knight head-on again. He would, in fact, never attack anything again but in the easiest and surest way. Only survival was important; and it did not matter how survival was accomplished, just so that it was…
Perhaps, the thought came to him much later, the others might have noticed this change in him and would have worked to reverse it, if it had not happened that, just at that time, as soon as he was well enough to participate, he was drawn into their discussion about what should be done next.
"… The decision," said Brian firmly at length, "must rest with you, Sir James. Geronde, he lent us his aid to get you free from Sir Hugh, and I'm in his debt for that. If he wishes to go first to the rescue of his lady—and Lord how can I object to that, seeing he's helped me to recover mine—I must go. You know that, milady."
"Of course I do," Geronde said, quickly.
They were all—except Smrgol, who had flown back on business of his own to the dragon cave—sitting at the high table of the castle hall after dinner and Jim was slaking an appetite for wine that had greatly recovered. Geronde was seated on the other side of Brian from Jim, and she leaned around the knight now to look directly into the dragon's eyes.
"I'm as much in debt to Sir James as you are, Brian," she said, "and bound like you to honor his decision. But, Sir James, I only want you to consider the advantages of moving against Hugh de Bois at just this time."
"Advantages for you, perhaps," Aragh growled at her. The wolf was always uncomfortable inside any building, and this made him even more bad-tempered than he was ordinarily. "I've no use for a castle. Nor should you, Gorbash!"
"But you wish an end to Sir Hugh as much as we," Geronde said to him. "You should want to go after him now, just as we do."
"I'll kill him when I find him; I won't hunt him. I hunt for food—not, like you humans, for anything cold or warm, wet or dry, that takes your fancy," snarled Aragh. "And Gorbash is like me, not like you."
"Gorbash may well be like you," Geronde retorted. "Sir James is not. And Sir James will be back in his own proper body one of these days. When that day comes, he may have need for a castle. Under law, I cannot acquire Sir Hugh's land and castle as long as there's doubt whether my father lives or not; and Malvern Castle and lands will go to Sir Brian as my husband, on our marriage, in any case. Meanwhile, once Sir Hugh is taken care of, we'll need a reliable neighbor; and the Bois de Malencontri is not an ill estate, even for a"—she glanced briefly down the length of the high table at Danielle—"person who may be of considerable degree."
"I say again, castles and lands are nothing to me," snarled Aragh. "What good are cold stone and dry earth? And I also say again they should be nothing to you, Gorbash. If Smrgol were here, he'd tell you that, too. In any case, I've been with you to guard your back and stand with you against the Dark Powers, not to help you gain human toys. You start lusting after things like that, Gorbash, and we go different ways!"
He rose to all four feet, turned and trotted from the hall, the castle people moving out of his way as he came close to them.
"Indeed," Dafydd agreed, when the wolf was gone, "and he could be right at that. Defending yourself is one thing, going to seek the killing is quite another, no matter how good the reason, look you."
"Don't listen to them, Sir James," said Danielle. "You don't need them, anyway. If you don't take that castle, somebody else will. Isn't that right, Father?"
"Since there's pay in it, count on me and my lads," Giles said to Lady Geronde. He turned to Danielle. "But it's business—business only—that takes us there. Beyond that, leave me out of this."
"I've promised you and your band half of the wealth Castle Malencontri contains," Geronde assured him. "You know it should be worth your while. Sir Hugh has been robbing his lesser neighbors for years."
"And I've agreed," said Giles. "It's not me you need consent from. It's Sir James."
Jim started to shrug before he remembered his dragon-body was not equipped to do so. Carolinus had told him that Angie would not be in discomfort while she was waiting for him to rescue her. A few more days, he thought now, out of his new inner bleakness—even an added week or two—should make little difference. Besides, just in case Carolinus couldn't get the two of them sent back to where they belonged, a castle and lands would not be a bad thing for them to own. The need for food and shelter—good food and comfortable shelter—was as much a reality here in this world as pain itself. And realities were not to be ignored.
"Why not?" he said. "All right, I'm in favor of moving on Hugh de Bois de Malencontri and his property now."
The moment he said it, a strange sort of ripple seemed to run through the air in the hall, something like the momentary shimmer of a heat wave, and the bleak feeling inside him expanded into a sensation of hollowness as if he and Gorbash's body together were only a shell enclosing
nothing at all. Jim blinked, half inclined to think his eyes were playing tricks on him because of the wine or the smoky atmosphere of the candle-lit room. But the impression was gone in the same instant it had seemed to exist; so that he found himself unsure he had really felt anything in the first place.
He looked around at the others, but they seemed to have noticed nothing, except for Dafydd, who was looking at him penetratingly.
"Good," said Geronde. "It's settled, then."
"I do not think it is good," Dafydd put in. "In my family, from father to son and mother to daughter for many generations now, there have been eyes to see warnings. And a moment past the candle flames here all bent, though there was no wind in the hall. I do not think this going after Sir Hugh now is good at all."
"Aragh frightened you, that's all," said Danielle.
"I am not frightened. But, no more than the wolf, am I a knight to be holding or taking of castles."
"I'll make you a knight," Danielle told him. "If I make you a knight, will that do away with your doubts?"
"For shame, Danielle!" said Giles. His face had darkened. "Knighthood is no jest."
Dafydd got to his feet.
"You are making sport of me," he said. "But since you will do this thing, I'll do it also, because I love you. For now, I will go out into the clean air and the clean woods by myself."
He, too, left the hall.
"Here, here!" said Brian, cheerfully. "Let's have an end to doom-saying for a bit. Fill your cups! We've agreed now. To the soon taking of Sir Hugh and his castle!"
"And Sir Hugh himself, one day closer to the fire," added Geronde. They drank.
Early the next day they set off, without Aragh but with Giles' outlaws reinforced by some forty men drawn from Malvern Castle and the other de Chaney estates. Geronde herself had been fiercely eager to come with them; but her sense of duty to the castle and lands of her father was capable of overriding even her thirst for vengeance. So, she had agreed to stay behind. They saw her standing on the castle wall, looking after them, until the trees of the forest blocked her from view.