Dragonsbane. Barbara Hambly

braids hanging down like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she called 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 blinked, making another mental readjustment. “‘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 relationship—still stood down the lane, against the curtain wall. They might regard her with awe, these hard-working people with their small lives circumscribed by the work of the seasons, but she knew their lives only a little less intimately than she knew her own. There was not a house in the village where she had not delivered a child, or tended the sick, or fought death in one of the myriad forms that it took in the Winterlands; she was familiar with them, and with the long-spun, intricate patterns of their griefs and joys. As the horses sloshed through mud and standing water to the center of the square, she saw Gareth looking about him with carefully concealed dismay at the pigs and chickens that shared the fetid lanes so amicably with flocks of shrieking children. A gust of wind blew the smoke of the forge over them, and with it a faint wash of heat and a snatch of Muffle the smith’s bawdy song; in one lane laundry flapped, and in another, Deshy Werville, whose baby Jenny had delivered three months ago, was milking one of her beloved cows half-in, half-out of her cottage door. Jenny saw how Gareth’s disapproving gaze lingered upon the shabby Temple, with its lumpish, crudely carved images of the Twelve Gods, barely distinguishable from one another in the gloom, and then went to the circled cross of Earth and Sky that was wrought into the stones of so many village chimneys. His back got a little stiffer at this evidence of paganism, and his upper lip appeared to lengthen as he regarded the pigpen built out from the Temple’s side and the pair of yokels in scruffy leather and plaids who leaned against the railings, gossiping.

      “Course, pigs see the weather,” one of them was saying, reaching with a stick across the low palings to scratch the back of the enormous black sow who reposed within. “That’s in Clivy’s On Farming, but I’ve seen them do it. And they’re gie clever, cleverer than dogs. My aunt Mary—you remember Aunt Mary?—used to train them as piglets and she had one, a white one, who’d fetch her shoes for her.”

      “Aye?” the second yokel said, scratching his head as Jenny drew rein near them, with Gareth fidgeting impatiently at her side.

      “Aye.” The taller man made kissing sounds to the sow, who raised her head in response with a slurping grunt of deepest affection. “It says in Polyborus’ Analects that the Old Cults used to worship the pig, and not as a devil, either, as Father Hiero would have it, but as the Moon Goddess.” He pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles a little higher on the bridge of his long nose, a curiously professorial gesture for a man ankle-deep in pig-muck.

      “That a fact, now?” the second yokel said with interest. “Now you come to speak on it, this old girl—when she were young and flighty, that is—had it figured to a T how to get the pen gate open, and would be after … Oh!” He bowed hastily, seeing Jenny and the fuming Gareth sitting their horses quietly.

      The taller of the two men turned. As the brown eyes behind the thick spectacle lenses met Jenny’s, they lost their habitual guarded expression and melted abruptly into an impish brightness. Middle-sized, unprepossessing, shaggy and unshaven in his scruffy dark leather clothing, his old wolfskin doublet patched with bits of metal and scraps of chain mail to protect his joints—after ten years, she wondered, what was there about him that still filled her with such absurd joy?

      “Jen.” He smiled and held out his hands to her.

      Taking them, she slid from the white mare’s saddle into his arms, while Gareth looked on in disapproving impatience to get on with his quest. “John,” she said, and turned back to the boy. “Gareth of Magloshaldon—this is Lord John Aversin, the Dragonsbane of Alyn Hold.”

      For one instant, Gareth was shocked absolutely speechless. He sat for a moment, staring, stunned as if struck over the head; then he dismounted so hastily that he clutched his hurt arm with a gasp. It was as if, Jenny thought, in all his ballad-fed fantasies of meeting the Dragonsbane, it had never occurred to him that his hero would be afoot, not to say ankle-deep in mud beside the local pigsty. In his face was plain evidence that, though he himself was over six-foot-three, and must be taller than anyone else he knew, he had never connected this with the fact that, unless his hero was a giant, he would perforce be shorter also. Neither, she supposed, had any ballad mentioned spectacles.

      Still Gareth had not spoken. Aversin, interpreting his silence and the look on his face with his usual fiendish accuracy, said, “I’d show you my dragon-slaying scars to prove it, but they’re placed where I can’t exhibit ’em in public.”

      It said worlds for Gareth’s courtly breeding—and, Jenny supposed, the peculiar stoicism of courtiers—that, even laboring under the shock of his life and the pain of a wounded arm, he swept into a very creditable salaam of greeting. When he straightened up again, he adjusted the set of his cloak with a kind of sorry hauteur, pushed his bent spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and said in a voice that was shaky but oddly determined, “My lord Dragonsbane, I have ridden here on errantry from the south, with a message for you from the King, Uriens of Belmarie.” He seemed to gather strength from these words, settling into the heraldic sonority of his ballad-snatch of golden swords and bright plumes in spite of the smell of the pigsty and the thin, cold rain that had begun to patter down.

      “My lord Aversin, I have been sent to bring you south. A dragon has come and laid waste the city of the gnomes in the Deep of Ylferdun; it lairs there now, fifteen miles from the King’s city of Bel. The King begs that you come to slay it ere the whole countryside is destroyed.”

      The boy drew himself up, having delivered himself of his quest, a look of noble and martyred serenity on his face, very like, Jenny thought, someone out of a ballad himself. Then, like all good messengers in ballads, he collapsed and slid to the soupy mud and cowpies in a dead faint.

      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 of Wyr measured approx. 27’ of which 12’ was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than 50’.

       TWO

      RAIN DRUMMED STEADILY, drearily, on the walls of Alyn Hold’s broken-down tower. The Hold’s single guest room was never very bright; and, though it was only mid-afternoon, Jenny had summoned a dim ball of bluish witchfire to illuminate the table on which she had spread the contents of her medicine satchel; the rest of the little cubbyhole was curtained in shadow.

      In