A rather more pleased tinkle. And everything changed.
Jim found himself suddenly standing in the Malencontri serving room, next to his own Great Hall. Aargh and Carolinus were no longer with him.
"But she must have been listening," said Jim to himself—but, unconsciously, out loud. "Otherwise how did she know we wanted to leave?"
The ghost of a tinkle that was almost like a chuckle sounded faintly nearly inside his ear.
"She says she did," spoke the little voice of Hob-One, behind him.
He turned and saw the hobgoblin behind him in the hearth, which merely had a low fire in it at the moment, barely more than embers; but there was a waft of smoke from these, and Hob was perched cross-legged on one of them.
"I'm glad you've come, my Lord," said Hob. "He's really been getting rather desperate!"
He was looking past Jim as he spoke those last words; and Jim, turning, saw Secoh sitting just inside the archway to the short passage leading from the serving room to the hall. Secoh did indeed look desperate. He looked worn out. His ears were drooping and his whole expression, for a dragon, was abject. The abjectness of it would not have struck Jim so sharply, if he had not been a dragon himself on occasion, and necessarily learned something about dragon expressions.
"My Lord—" said Secoh forlornly; and broke off, helplessly, simply sitting and staring at Jim.
"What is it?" asked Jim, pricked by conscience, plus a sudden new alarm. "I'm sorry I've been slow getting back to you, Secoh, but I didn't know there was any great urgency about it. I've been very busy indeed the last couple of days."
In view of Secoh's tragic expression, the excuse sounded remarkably weak.
"That's all right, my Lord," Secoh said. But the tone of his voice did not match his expression or general demeanor; which was somewhat like that of a dragon just a few moments from expiring.
"Good," said Jim encouragingly. "Go ahead, then."
"Well, my Lord," said Secoh, "I bring a message from the Cliffside dragons—that is, not exactly a message. I mean, they wanted me to talk to you and explain the situation. We've been hearing for some time about this time, I mean this time right now—that is, this is the time you georges call Christmastide. You know, five hundred years ago, we didn't pay much attention to things like that because—well, five hundred years ago it was different. For one thing, we mere-dragons were as big and healthy as the Cliffside dragons then, as of course you know. But my great-great-great-great-grandfather was supposed to have said, 'Look out for that Loathly Tower. It'll be the ruin of us yet.' "
Secoh relaxed a little and his speech became less garbled.
"It seems that what he said was remembered because, as you know—well, our present condition—it's very difficult to explain this to you, my Lord; but it's very important to us. Very important, indeed. As my great-great-grandmother said—"
Secoh was getting wild-eyed again; and rapidly becoming more incoherent. He was also, Jim saw, fighting the normal dragon urge to go back to the beginning of time, when he wanted to tell something, and build up over hundreds of years of history to the point he wanted to make about the present moment. Jim suddenly had a rather shrewd idea of why it was Secoh here before him and not one of the Cliffside dragons himself.
Secoh had the stunted size of all the present-day mere-dragons as a result of what the Loathly Tower had actually done to them; just as Secoh's great-great-great-great-grandfather had prophesied. When Jim had first met him he had been the most timid and obsequious creature Jim could have imagined, with a dragon's size and natural weapons. But that had been before he joined with Brian, Dafydd the Welsh bowman and Smrgol, the grand-uncle of the dragon whose body Jim had then occupied. Smrgol had been an elderly dragon crippled by a stroke; but Smrgol had a great deal of courage, and his help had been needed to win the decisive battle with the Dark Powers in the Loathly Tower.
Secoh had never meant to make one of their party. But Smrgol had given the mere-dragon little choice.
So, Secoh had ended up fighting like a hero and being part of the victory. Ever since then, his character had made an abrupt about-face. He was now the exact opposite of timid and obsequious. He went around challenging and bullying every other dragon he met, no matter how big that dragon happened to be.
His self-image had completely changed. He was now convinced of his own courage; and as he saw it, he couldn't lose. A bigger dragon might easily be strong enough to tear him apart; but there would be nothing but more honor in his dying after challenging someone so much more powerful than he was.
On the other hand, the large dragons were steadily ducking Secoh's challenges. From their standpoint, they had no way to win. Even if they managed to beat Secoh into submission or kill him outright, they would only have conquered a very much smaller and weaker dragon than themselves. Also, berserker that Secoh had now turned out to be, he would undoubtedly cut them up pretty badly while they were in the process of subduing or killing him.
In short, if Secoh was here with whatever he was trying to tell Jim now, the reason he was here and not one of the other dragons was simply because the rest were afraid to face Jim. A curious situation.
"—Of course, they know you've been friendly to me, my Lord," Secoh was babbling on, "so they thought it would be better if I spoke to you. As my great-granduncle said once, 'If you don't ask for a share of the kill, you probably won't get any—' "
"So, they want to make some demand of me, do they?" asked Jim, to help the mere-dragon along.
"Oh no, my Lord!" said Secoh. "Not demand. Never demand. Plea! I'm bringing a plea to you from the Cliffside dragons. A plea for assistance, for permission… for help at this time of year."
Puzzled as to why the Cliffside dragons would want any help from him, particularly at this time of year when they would be happily tucked away in their warm caves, content to drink up their stores of wine, tell each other stories, and simply wait for spring to come around, Jim drove directly to the heart of what seemed to be the question.
"What exactly is it they want?" he asked.
"My Lord," Secoh turned tragic eyes upon him. "They want—we all want—to be part of Christmastide."
Jim stared at him.
"They do?" said Jim.
"And they thought"—Secoh got it out in a sort of final gasp—"that you could arrange it."
Chapter 15
Little by little, Jim began extracting bits of relevant information from out of an avalanche of details about Secoh's personal ancestors, histories of dragons residing both in meres and cliffs—and a fragmented account of interaction between dragons and georges, as dragons chose to call humans.
Dragons had once hunted georges as they would any other game, but eventually found out that they were difficult prey to take. They went on to become more and more difficult, turning downright dangerous by the time of the last few hundred years, in which weapons and armor—and particularly crossbows, longbows and their arrows—had come into use. Finally, the substance of what Secoh had brought him as a plea began to emerge.
In more recent centuries dragons had gradually switched from trying to hunt humans, to avoiding them whenever possible. But only just since the battle at the Loathly Tower had they begun to take a real interest in humans. An incident in which their kind fought side by side with georges was a powerful stimulant to dragon curiosity. Since then they had begun tentatively to have an occasional peaceful interaction between a dragon and a george. These had been prompted, as a matter of fact, by Secoh; who kept coming back and telling of the adventures he had had, as a result of his friendship with Jim, Brian and the rest.
The result was that some of the legends that the humans knew had begun to be known by dragons. These legends, of course, were usually acquired from people like woodcutters, solitary plowmen, and such unlettered folk—individuals who could be encountered well away from any other georges, or in a place where a trap could not easily be sprung on the dragon foolhardy enough to stop and talk. This cont
act had been justified by something Smrgol had said repeatedly while he was alive—that dragons and georges should get to know each other.
As with humans, the Cliffside dragons had a strong tendency to pay more attention to what a dragon had said after he was dead, than when he had been around to say it. Alive, Smrgol could only evoke an argument by making that statement to any other dragon. Dead, the others stopped to consider it; and ended up being cautiously attracted by it.
The attraction had paid off. Dragons loved stories. Stories were appreciated only a little less than wine; and wine only second to their hoards, in the list of what dragons valued. Now they had discovered that humans also loved stories. Moreover, the stories they loved best were stories about miracles and other strange or violent happenings—all very much to dragon taste.
Moreover, the best of these could usually be traced to a quantity of Biblical writing, some of it authentic and some of it by unknown writers making use of the pretense that their works were the writings of well-known saints or holy men.
This area had not been completely unknown to the dragons. They had been aware for several hundred years of the story of St. George and the Dragon. Surprisingly, after their first fifty to eighty years of indignation over the dragon being the villain of the piece—and worse yet, the loser in the fight—the legend had become an attractive story that led to enjoyable debate over how the dragon should have fought St. George so as to beat the good saint. Nearly every dragon who had lived since that time had had his own theory of how he could have fought St. George and won.
A by-product of this had been the fact that the dragons started christening all humans as "georges."
At any rate, the dragon appetite for human legends and miraculous-happenings had grown by what it fed on. They had come at last on a legend that Jim managed to recognize, from Secoh's highly distorted version. It was a story that could only have originated as part of one of the apocryphal epistles of the Christian Bible's New Testament. A work by an unknown writer, referred to in Jim's world and time by the name of "pseudo-Matthew."
This legend the Cliffside dragons had somehow mixed up with the idea of the Christmas celebration of Christ's birth; and that had brought about a reaction that touched on one of dragonhood's innermost strongest feelings.
In a nutshell, the story as Jim had read it himself, in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, was of a time when the Holy Family was fleeing toward Egypt, to escape Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents—all the children in Israel under five years of age—because Herod, then the King of Israel, had heard that one of them was the Christ Child who had come and would displace him from the throne.
With kingly logic, it had occurred to Herod that he could neatly frustrate this possibility before it could get under way, simply by killing off all children who might have been born in the right time slot to occupy his throne.
Joseph, Mary and the young Christ, on their flight from Herod into Egypt—in the story Jim had read and Secoh had heard—had been escorted by a guard of all kinds of animals; the lion and the ox and the wolf and the sheep—predator and prey together, walking side by side in perfect harmony in an honor guard for Mary, Joseph and the young Christ. Then, according to pseudo-Matthew, the Holy Family had camped overnight in some rather rugged country next to a cliff with a cave in it—or perhaps it was just some large rocks. Jim found his memory was a little fuzzy on details—
But in the morning when they got up at first light, out of the cliffs, or the caves in them, unexpectedly came dragons, creatures far too large and powerful for the animal escort to protect the Holy Family from. Joseph was frightened for them.
But the young Christ, who as Jim remembered should have been about toddler age by this time, reassured his father.
"Fear not," he said to Joseph. "These good creatures have only fulfilled what was spoken by David the prophet. 'Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and ye beasts. Let them approach.' "
And he had stretched out his young arm toward the dragons, inviting them to come and be blessed.
That was the legend as Jim's memory fed it back to him. It had been only six years since he had studied Palgrave's Golden Treasury as part of his graduate work back in the twentieth century; but a lot had happened in that time, particularly during the last three years in this world.
Secoh had the legend fairly much as Jim remembered it. But not quite; and what he did have was wonderfully mixed up with matters as they were now, as well as with a number of contemporary people and things.
However, by this time all Jim had to do was listen. Effectively, Secoh had been uncorked like a bottle of effervescent wine; and eventually the problem became to stop him from talking, rather than fizz away indefinitely.
"—You see, what they say happened," Secoh was saying now. To him, or any other dragon, "story" and "history" were the same thing. " Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and ye beasts. Let them approach.' "
"Yes," said Jim.
"Well, you understand!" said Secoh. "You're a dragon like the rest of us, even if you have to be a george part of the time. You know how we dragons are. The trouble with georges is they think we're just some sort of animal, along with the actual animals. But we aren't. They're only animals. We're dragons!"
They had finally come to the mother lode at the core of all the garbled veins of legendary ore that Secoh had been working toward.
Jim did understand.
When he had first come here and been in his dragon body, even though he was at that time effectively a dragon, he would not have understood. But he did now. He had begun to understand when the crippled Smrgol, more by force of will than anything else, had literally dragged Secoh into the battle before the Loathly Tower. Smrgol had told Brian, Jim and Dafydd all about it, booming out the information in his tremendous bass voice.
"… And letting a george go in where he didn't dare go, himself! 'Boy,' I said to him, 'don't give me this nonsense about being only a mere-dragon. Mere's got nothing to do with what kind of dragon you are. What kind of world would it be if we all went around talking like that?'
And Smrgol had tried to mimic someone talking in a high voice but had succeeded in lifting his words only into the middle-bass level.
" 'Oh, I'm in just a plowland-and-pasture dragon. You'll just have to excuse me.—I'm just a halfway-up-the-hill dragon… ' 'Boy!' I said to him, 'you're a DRAGON! Get that straight, once and for all time! And a dragon ACTS like a dragon, or he doesn't act at all!' "
—Then there had been a time, later on, when Brian and Jim had been in France on a secret mission. Secoh had appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the night at the inn where Jim was staying; and in order to keep the inn people—to say nothing of the townspeople—from discovering he had a dragon in his quarters, Jim had magicked Secoh into a human being to make him safe. Secoh had been delighted with the idea until he was actually changed. Then he had taken one look at his own scrawny human body—naked, of course, since dragons didn't wear clothes—and burst out in horror.
"Oh, no!" he had said.
The truth of the matter was, Jim had come to realize, that dragons did not at all consider themselves a lesser species than humans—just different. Most of all, they did not even begin to consider any idea that they should simply be classed as one more animal species by the georges. The very notion was shocking to them. As far as they were concerned, the hierarchy in the world consisted of dragons, georges just below them, and below the georges all the other animals. Their upset and indignation over every george they met taking it for granted that they were no more than a large animal—possibly one that was half-demon as well, but otherwise simply animal—had rankled and burned within each dragon ever since the time of the historic duel with St. George.
So now Jim knew what was exciting the dragons at Cliffside; and why Secoh had been so concerned about reaching him with the story, plus a plea for Jim's understanding and help.
" 'Ye dragons AND ye beasts,' " Secoh repeated. "You s
ee, my Lord? Your Christ Child himself said it. And, since he's come down from London with your friend Sir John—"
Jim blinked. Here were some even more far-fetched elements tangling the situation. It would never have occurred to him in a hundred years that the dragons could manage to confuse Christ with young Prince Edward at the Earl's. Clearly, Secoh and the rest were firmly of the opinion that the birth of Christ either was taking place this particular Christmas, or miraculously happened over again every Christmas; and that somehow the episode with the beasts and the dragons and the rest of the legend was to take place any moment now during the rest of the twelve days of Christmas.
"So if you don't mind," Secoh was winding up at last, "we'd like you to have me and some other dragons come to this castle you're at right now, so we can be there at the right time to worship the Christ Child and have him bless us. That's what the story goes on to say, you know. He blesses us. What does that mean, my Lord? To bless, I mean?"
"It's rather like being given an invisible gift," said Jim, extemporizing hurriedly. "You can't see it, or feel it, or smell it, but it makes you happier and it means you'll be a better dragon from then on."
Secoh's eyes grew round with excitement.
"How much bigger?" he asked.
"Better" said Jim, "not bigger. You'll be a finer and braver dragon afterward."
"I'm already quite brave," said Secoh.
"Well," said Jim, "you'll be surprised. There's no limit to how brave you can be. Everyone will be startled by how much braver you are. Wait and see. You may even be remembered in a story yourself, as a result."
Secoh beamed.
That was one of the good things about dragons, thought Jim. They could forget their troubles and be happy at the twitch of an eyelid.
But now, for the main problem.
"As far as getting you involved in the Christmastide celebrations," said Jim, "that's more complicated than I can explain easily. I'm not absolutely sure how to manage it. But, you see, there are twelve days in Christmas, and we've only used up one so far, so there are eleven days to go and probably what you've been talking about won't happen until the last day. So we've got eleven days to go."