The morning was overcast as it had been on that day when they had retaken Malvern Castle from Sir Hugh. This day, however, the clouds did not clear. Instead they thickened, and soon a light, steady drizzle began.
Their way led at first through alternate woods and open spaces, but as the morning wore on the tree cover became general, the ground low-lying and wet. They were moving into an area of small lakes and bogs, and the wagon track they were following soon became miry and slippery. Their party straggled, and separated into groups spread out over half a mile.
But more than their pattern of travel seemed affected by the grayness of the day: the damp dullness of the atmosphere seemed to produce a sullenness of temper. Those on foot, like the outlaws and the forty men from the Castle Malvern lands, trudged along head-down against the falling water, their bowstrings cased, their weapons hooded. The outlaws' previous custom of rough jokes and friendly insults had vanished. When they spoke it was sourly, expressing their dissatisfaction with the weather, the route, and the probable cost—in deaths and wounds—of reducing the castle they were going to assault. Old arguments were dredged up between individuals and tempers grew short.
Even the leaders of the expedition seemed affected by the general change in attitude. Giles was grim, Danielle sharp-tongued and Dafydd completely uncommunicative. It was as if the whole party was reacting to a feeling that something was wrong.
Jim took refuge, at last, at the head of the column with the single exception to this general malaise: Brian on Blanchard was his invariable self. There was something cheerfully spartan and unyielding about the knight. His personal world appeared to have had all its essential questions and uncertainties settled long ago. The sun might shine, snow might fall, wine might flow or blood be spilled—but all these were surface variations, to be ignored ordinarily as beneath notice. Brian gave the impression that he would joke with his torturers as they were stretching him on the rack.
Jim told him about the way the others were acting, particularly the leaders.
"Shouldn't worry about it," said Brian.
"But it's important to keep everybody working together, isn't it? For example, what if Giles suddenly decided to pull out with all his band? We'd be left with the forty men from Malvern, half of whom don't look as if they know anything about fighting."
"I don't think Giles would do that," said the knight. "He knows there's wealth to be got for him and his lads in Sir Hugh's stronghold. Also, he's agreed to go—and was a gentleman once, pretty clearly, though he won't admit it now."
"Well, even if Giles personally can be counted on," Jim added, "there could be trouble with Danielle and Dafydd that might end up involving her father. Dafydd's been saying less with every mile, and Danielle won't let up on him. Actually, she shouldn't be along on this, anyway, except that nobody seems to have had the guts to tell her she couldn't come."
"Master Welshman wouldn't have come without her."
"True," Jim admitted. "But you have to concede she's no warrior—"
"Are you sure about that?" asked Brian. "Ever seen her shoot?"
"Just that time her arrows came at us. And in the looted village. All right, she can handle a bow—"
"Not just a bow," the knight said. "She draws a longbow with a hundred-pound pull, like half the archers in her father's band."
Jim blinked. Years ago in college, he had taken a passing interest in bow-hunting. Practicing at targets, he had begun with a forty-pound bow and graduated to a sixty-pound one. Sixty pounds had felt, to him, like the practical limit—and he did not consider himself weak.
"How do you know?" he asked.
"Saw her shooting after you were lanced, at the taking of Malvern Castle while some fighting was still going on."
"She was at the castle?" Jim asked, startled. "I thought she stayed in the woods. But how could you tell, just seeing her shoot?"
Brian looked sideways at him with curiosity as they moved forward together.
"It's a strange land you must come from overseas, James," he said. "By watching the arrow as it leaves her bow, of course."
"Watching her arrow?"
"See how much it lifts as it leaves the string," Brian explained. "When I saw her, she was still aiming under her mark at ten rods' distance. Pull no more than an eighty-pound bow myself. Of course, I'm no archer. But Mistress Danielle is no weakling."
Jim trudged on alongside Blanchard and the mounted knight for a long moment of silence, absorbing this.
"If she pulls a hundred-pound bow, what does Dafydd pull?"
"Lord, who knows? A hundred-and-fifty? Two-hundred? Even more than that? The Welshman doesn't fit any ordinary suit of clothes. You've seen he's his own bowyer and fletcher—and a rare craftsman at both. I wager there's not an archer in Giles' band—assuming he could draw it when he got it—who'd not give ten years' earnings for that bow of Master Dafydd's. With the longbow, the secret's all in the taper towards the ends of the bowstave, you know. Even allowing for the man's strength, it's not just a case of cutting himself a heavier, longer bow that lets him shoot the flights he does, and that accurately. There's a cunning and an art built into his weapon that goes beyond the skill of the ordinary bowyer. You heard Giles when Master Dafydd first undertook to slay the guards on the castle walls from the edge of the woods. And, of course, the same holds true for the arrows the Welshman makes. Any of these outlaw lads'd no doubt trade half the teeth in his head for a quiverful of those."
"I see," said Jim.
The information sank into the back of his mind and lay there leadenly. Once upon a time, he realized, before his encounter with Sir Hugh, he would have found this kind of information fascinating. Now, it only left him vaguely resentful—against Dafydd for possessing such knowledge and skill, and toward Brian for the condescension he thought he heard in the knight's voice when explaining it to him.
He said nothing more; and Brian, after making a few further remarks aimed at continuing the conversation, gave up and turned Blanchard about to trot back down the track and check on the rest of the expedition. Left alone, Jim plodded on, scarcely noticing where he was going. He realized he was traveling by himself now, but that suited his present mood. He had no wish for company—particularly for the company of these medieval characters, both beast and human.
In fact, now that he glanced about, himself, he could see neither people nor horses, nor anything of the wagon track they had been following. Undoubtedly the track had taken one of its reasonless curves—like a footpath, it had evidently developed along the route of easiest travel. There was no construction to it as a road at all, with the result that it often went widely out of its way to avoid a patch of bushes which a man with an ax could have cleared in an hour or two of work. It had probably detoured; and he, tied up in his thoughts, had unconsciously taken the direct route, straight ahead—in which case, he would be running into it again shortly, when it curved back to its base line of direction.
Meanwhile, as Jim was telling himself, the isolation was not unwelcome. He had had it with strange worlds, talking creatures, blood, battle, superhumans and supernatural forces—all of these in the context of a primitive technology and elemental society.
When you got down to it, he thought, there was a limit to how much living you could do with animals. Smrgol and Aragh, as well as the other dragons, were animals in spite of the fact that they could talk. For that matter, the humans he had met were no better—human animals, operating by custom, instinct or emotion, but never by civilized thought. For all her beauty, Danielle was hardly more than a fur-clad female out of the Stone Age. Similarly, for all his craft and skill, Dafydd could have stepped right out of a Cro-Magnon hunting party. Giles was a clever old criminal, no more; and Brian was a pain-indifferent killing machine who thought with his muscles. As for Geronde—she was a pure savage in her happy anticipation of the torture she would inflict on her enemy once she had captured him.
What had made him think—back in the cleanliness and comfort of
the twentieth-century world he belonged to—that he would ever find it attractive, let alone pleasant, to live with people like these? Their redeeming qualities were nil. Any obligation or affection he might think he was developing toward them was nothing but the product of a false romanticism.
He broke off at this point in his thoughts to realize that he had been traveling for some time and had not yet come upon the wagon track or seen any sign of the rest of the party. Possibly the wagon track had run out. Possibly they had turned off on some other route. Possibly, even, they had decided to halt for the day—because the rain was now coming down quite heavily. Well, in any case, they could take care of themselves; and he could rejoin them tomorrow. He felt no need of their company; and with his dragon's insensitiveness to temperature and weather, it made little difference to him that the day had grown wet and chilly.
In fact, now that he thought of it, it suited his own mood to have the day drawing to a prematurely gray close and the skies pouring down upon the dripping trees and sodden earth that surrounded him.
Nevertheless, he looked about, picked out a grove of trees and walked over to it. It was a simple matter to pull up some of the larger saplings by the roots and lean their tops together, teepee-fashion, to produce a makeshift shelter. The interlaced tops, still thick with leaves, did provide him some protection against the falling rain.
Jim curled up inside the shelter with a good deal of satisfaction. The day was gathering into gloom, now. He had no idea where the others were, he could not find them if he wanted to, and that was as it should be.
They could not find him either—and that was as it should be…
He was preparing to tuck his head under a wing, when a sound registered on him that he had been hearing faintly but which had been growing slowly in volume for some time. For a second his mind refused to identify it; and then recognition came, clear and unmistakable.
Sandmirks—approaching.
Chapter Eighteen
Jim was out of the shelter before he realized he had moved—and was ready to run. What checked him was the same instinct he felt at the time he had encountered sandmirks before: the wordless understanding that to try to run from them was the beginning of the end. It was a knowledge that came from the deepest levels of Gorbash's brain.
He stood where he was, in the increasing darkness, his jaws parted, his tongue flickering in and out between them. His breath was snarled in his throat. If he had any idea in which direction Brian and the others could be found, there might be some sense in running. If he could reach them, there was perhaps safety in numbers. Just why there should be, he was not quite sure; but the impression persisted, instinctively. Furthermore, he knew that sandmirks vastly preferred to attack a helpless and outnumbered victim. Maybe a large group of humans or animals together could resist the fear the sandmirks tried to breed in the minds of those they wanted to destroy and devour. If the victims could resist, then they might be able to attack the sandmirks in turn. The sandmirks, as he had seen, were not likely to stand against those who had no fear of them—witness, the speed with which they had fled when Aragh had driven them off.
But which way should he go to find the expedition against Sir Hugh? As he had considered earlier, they might have diverged from the path or halted for the night, some time since. They might even have turned back. If he began to run and it turned out he was headed in the wrong direction, he would be running into the sandmirks' jaws.
One thing was certain: he had no Aragh to come to his rescue here. Even if the wolf had hung around Malvern long enough to see whether Jim would, indeed, go along on the expedition, he would have had his worst fears confirmed long since; and he would have taken off in a direction back to his own woods. He would be miles beyond hearing the voices that were closing in on Jim now.
Fear and rage, combined, flared like living flames inside Jim. The breath snarled once more in his throat. His head darted left and right, reflexively, like the head of a driven animal hearing the sounds of the beaters closing in on it from all sides. There had to be some way out. Some way…
But there was none.
The frantic, instinctive darting of his head slowed and then stopped. The rage in him died. Now he was only afraid, and the fear filled him completely. At last, he faced the fact that he was right to be afraid: there was something wrong with him if he was not. It was death he heard coming—his death.
He stood in the rainy darkness, hearing the chittering of the sandmirks growing closer. They were only minutes away from surrounding him now. He had no place to flee to; and it would be too late to flee once they had arrived. His mind reached the furthest possible limit of despair and went beyond, into a kind of limitless, colorless clarity.
He saw himself clearly now. He had wandered off, rehearsing in his mind all the things he could find wrong with Brian and the others. But the arguments against them that he had summoned up were only a smoke screen for what was wrong with himself. It was not Brian, Smrgol, Aragh and the others who were so much less than he, but he who was so much less than they. If it had not been for the accident that had landed him in the powerful flesh he now wore, he would be nothing. In his own body he would not have been able to qualify as the least member of Giles' band. Could he pull a hundred-pound longbow, let alone hit anything with an arrow from it? Could he, clad in the best armor in the world and mounted on the best warhorse, delude himself that he could last as an opponent of Brian's or Sir Hugh's for two minutes?
He knew better now. It was very ego-pampering to cannon into men-at-arms whom he outweighed five to one and send them flying. It was very comfortable to tell people living in a rigidly stratified society that he had been a baron, and let them surmise that he had perhaps been a prince. But what had happened when a real lance actually went through him? All at once the fun had gone out of the game. He was ready to pick up his marbles and go home.
Now, alone, with the sandmirks closing in on him, and facing himself at last, he saw that this was no soft world he and Angie had landed in. It was a hard one; and all those he had met here—Smrgol, Brian, Aragh, Giles, Dafydd, Danielle, even Secoh and Dick Innkeeper—were battle-scarred survivors of it. They were survivors because they had the courage required to survive. That courage he had resented in them when he had flown onto the lance point of Hugh de Bois and discovered that he could be killed, just like anyone else. The discovery had woken him to a realization of how little of their sort of courage he had ever been called on—in his own world—to show.
Now it no longer mattered whether he could be courageous or not, because he was going to die, anyway. The sandmirks were just beyond the trees that ringed him; and the panic born of their cluttering was beginning to eat at his brain. They would be certain of him this time. He had not even a campfire to keep them at a distance. Cleverly, once again, they had come on a rainy, cloud-thick night when a dragon could not take to the air for fear of flying blindly into a tree or cliff; and when he, like any ordinary earth-bound animal, could only attempt to escape on foot. The only difference now from the time before was that he had at last come to terms with himself—a single, small triumph, the one thing that made him different from a simple dragon-victim.
The breath checked in his lungs. For a moment even the sandmirk voices were forgotten. He had, at least, a final choice. He would die either way, but he could still choose how. What was it he had said to Carolinus, back when they first met? "… But I'm not a dragon?"
Nor was he. Gorbash might have no choice in this situation, but he was Jim Eckert, who had. He could go down, he could die, still trying to reach the Loathly Tower and rescue Angie—by himself, if necessary—not as a helpless meal for sandmirks.
It might be death to fly, but he preferred that death to staying here. He gaped his jaws and roared at the sandmirks. He crouched and sprang upward into the rain and the darkness; and the sound of the cluttering faded quickly to silence and was lost, far below and behind.
Pumping his wings, he reached for a
ltitude. It was a forlorn hope to think that the cloud cover would be low enough for him to mount above it. And, even if it was, and he did, above those clouds and rain on a night like this one where would he find thermals to soar on? A good wind could save him—but weather like this did not go with strong, steady winds above a layer of rainclouds. If he could not soar, sooner or later he would become wing-weary and start to lose altitude. After that the crash to earth would be inevitable.
But for now, his strength was still with him. He beat upward through the downpour. Darkness surrounded him—before, behind, above, below. He felt as if he were hanging still in a wet and lightless void, exerting all his strength but going nowhere. No pause came in the rain, no rift in the darkness overhead to show a patch of starlit sky.
Judging by the altitude he had gained previously in a first few minutes of upward flying, he thought he should easily be above five thousand feet by this time. He tried to remember what he knew about rain-clouds. Most precipitation, he vaguely remembered learning once, fell from nimbostratus, altostratus or cumulonimbus clouds. Cumulonimbus were low-lying, but the other two were in a middle range—up to twenty thousand feet or so. Clearly, he could not fly above twenty thousand feet. His lungs were the lungs of any animal adapted to a planetary surface. He would run out of oxygen at that altitude—even if the cold of the higher air did not freeze him.
A faint but steady wind pushed the rain along at his present altitude; and instinctively he had been heading into it to gain lift. He took a chance now and stiffened out his wings in soaring position while he caught his breath. He had no visible evidence that he was losing altitude, but he could feel the pressure of the air on the underside of his wings; and this sensation sent clear signals to his dragon-brain that he was now on a shallow glide back toward the ground. He dared not prolong the glide. He might be losing altitude faster than he thought.