Dragonsbane. Barbara Hambly

certain villages believing that if you plant loveseed—those creeper-things with the purple trumpet-flowers on them—around your house, dragons won’t come near. Jen and I used bits of that kind of lore—Jen brewed a poison from the loveseed to put on my harpoons, because it was obvious on the face of it that no fiddling little sword was going to cut through those scales. And the poison did slow the thing down. But I don’t know near as much about them as I’d like.”

      “No.” Jenny turned her eyes at last from the fire’s throbbing core and, resting her cheek upon her hand where it lay on her up-drawn knees, regarded the two men on either side of the book-cluttered table. She spoke softly, half to herself. “We know not where they come from, nor where they breed; why of all the beasts of the earth they have six limbs instead of four …”

      “‘Maggots from meat,’” quoted John, “‘weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.’ That’s in Terens’ Of Ghosts. Or Caerdinn’s ‘Save a dragon, slave a dragon.’ Or why they say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes—and I’ll tell you, Gar, I was gie careful not to do that. We don’t even know simple things, like why magic and illusion won’t work on them; why Jen couldn’t call the dragon’s image in that jewel of hers, or use a cloaking-spell against his notice—nothing.”

      “Nothing,” Jenny said softly, “save how they died, slain by men as ignorant of them as we.”

      John must have heard the strange sorrow that underlay her voice, for she felt his glance, worried and questioning. But she turned her eyes away, not knowing the answer to what he asked.

      After a moment, John sighed and said to Gareth, “It’s all knowledge that’s been lost over the years, like Luciard’s Firegiver and how they managed to build a breakwater across the harbor mouth at Eldsbouch—knowledge that’s been lost and may never be recovered.”

      He got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, the flat, whitish gray reflections from the window winking on spike and mail-scrap and the brass of dagger-hilt and buckle. “We’re living in a decaying world, Gar; things slipping away day by day. Even you, down south in Bel—you’re losing the Realm a piece at a time, with the Winterlands tearing off in one direction and the rebels pulling away the Marches in another. You’re losing what you had and don’t even know it, and all that while knowledge is leaking out the seams, like meal from a ripped bag, because there isn’t time or leisure to save it.”

      “I would never have slain the dragon, Gar—slay it, when we know nothing about it? And it was beautiful in itself, maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, every color of it perfect as sunset, like a barley field in certain lights you get on summer evenings.”

      “But you must—you have to slay ours!” There was sudden agony in Gareth’s voice.

      “Fighting it and slaying it are two different things.” John turned back from the window, his head tipped slightly to one side, regarding the boy’s anxious face. “And I haven’t yet said I’d undertake the one, let alone accomplish the other.”

      “But you have to.” The boy’s voice was a forlorn whisper of despair. “You’re our only hope.”

      “Am I?” the Dragonsbane asked gently. “I’m the only hope of all these villagers, through the coming winter, against wolves and bandits. It was because I was their only hope that I slew the most perfect creature I’d ever seen, slew it dirtily, filthily, chopping it to pieces with an ax—it was because I was their only hope that I fought it at all and near had my flesh shredded from my bones by it. I’m only a man, Gareth.”

      “No!” the boy insisted desperately. “You’re the Dragonsbane—the only Dragonsbane!” He rose to his feet, some inner struggle plain upon his thin features, his breathing fast as if forcing himself to some exertion. “The King …” He swallowed hard. “The King told me to make whatever terms I could, to bring you south. If you come …” With an effort he made his voice steady. “If you come, we will send troops again to protect the northlands, to defend them against the Iceriders; we will send books, and scholars, to bring knowledge to the people again. I swear it.” He took up the King’s seal and held it out in his trembling palm, and the cold daylight flashed palely across its face. “In the King’s name I swear it.”

      But Jenny, watching the boy’s white face as he spoke, saw that he did not meet John’s eyes.

      As night came on the rain increased, the wind throwing it like sea-breakers against the walls of the Hold. John’s Aunt Jane brought up a cold supper of meat, cheese, and beer, which Gareth picked at with the air of one doing his duty. Jenny, sitting cross-legged in the corner of the hearth, unwrapped her harp and experimented with its tuning pegs while the men spoke of the roads that led south, and of the slaying of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

      “That’s another thing that wasn’t like the songs,” Gareth said, resting his bony elbows amid the careless scatter of John’s notes on the table. “In the songs the dragons are all gay-colored, gaudy. But this one is black, dead-black all over save for the silver lamps of its eyes.”

      “Black,” repeated John quietly, and looked over at Jenny. “You had an old list, didn’t you, love?”

      She nodded, her hands resting in the delicate maneuverings of the harp pegs. “Caerdinn had me memorize many old lists,” she explained to Gareth. “Some of them he told me the meaning of—this one he never did. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. It was names, and colors …” She closed her eyes and repeated the list, her voice falling into the old man’s singsong chant, the echo of dozens of voices, back through the length of years. “Teltrevir heliotrope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold; Astirith is primrose and black; Morkeleb alone, black as night … The list goes on—there were dozens of names, if names they are.” She shrugged and linked her fingers over the curve of the harp’s back. “But John tells me that the old dragon that was supposed to haunt the shores of the lake of Wevir in the east was said to have been blue as the waters, marked all over his back with patterns of gold so that he could lie beneath the surface of the lake in summer and steal sheep from the banks.”

      “Yes!” Gareth almost bounced out of his chair with enthusiasm as he recognized the familiar tale. “And the Worm of Wevir was slain by Antara Warlady and her brother Darthis Dragonsbane in the last part of the reign of Yvain the Well-Beloved, who was …” He caught himself up again, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s a popular tale,” he concluded, red-faced.

      Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebullience. “There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes, really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got them right.”

      She put her harp to her shoulder, a small instrument that had also been Caerdinn’s, though he had not played it; the wood was darkened almost black with age. By daylight it appeared perfectly unadorned, but when firelight glanced across it, as it did now, the circles of the air and sea were sometimes visible, traced upon it in faded gold. Carefully, she picked out those strange, sweet knots of sound, sometimes two or three notes only, sometimes a string of them like a truncated air. They were individual in the turns of their timing, hauntingly half-familiar, like things remembered from childhood; and as she played she repeated the names: Teltrevir heliotrope, Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold … It was part of the lost knowledge, like that from John’s scatterbrained, jackdaw quest in the small portion of his time not taken up with the brutal demands of the Winterlands. Notes and words were meaningless now, like a line from a lost ballad, or a few torn pages from the tragedy of an exiled god, pasted to keep wind from a crack—the echoes of songs that would not be heard again.

      From them her hands moved on, random as her passing thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sorrows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called the soul like the distant glitter of Stardust banners in the summer night. In time John took from its place in a hole by the hearth a tin penny whistle, such as children played in the streets, and