"So I caught them, most of them, one by one, in their rooms and corridors, and had no trouble killing them off. There were one or two who gave me some trouble; but of course they were on foot, and not wearing their shells, so—"
"So actually he almost had no trouble at all," sneered Maigra. Sorpil turned his head briefly to scowl at her before turning back to Jim.
"So we took over this château over a hundred years ago," he went on, "and since then the peasants bring their taxes to us, instead of to the georges. The result is the fine food and drink we're able to offer you tonight."
The statement about food and drink was something of an exaggeration, Jim thought. It was true the three sheep that Maigra had brought freshly slaughtered to the table, hide, bones, and innards intact, had been relatively fat and quite tasty from a dragon's point of view. The wine was not bad; and Jim would actually have never thought to look at it otherwise than with approval, if he had not already had some weeks of experience with what was actually available in the way of wines, here in France itself.
The large keg, the top of which Sorpil had stove in with something of a ceremonial flourish, so that they could each dip into it with the human-made pitchers they used as drinking cups, contained a wine that was a bit better than some of the worst Jim had tasted since he had stepped ashore in Brest. It was also a long way from being the best that Jim had tasted since that moment.
Jim suspected that he was being given the type of wine they kept for their ordinary dining, figuring that an English dragon wouldn't know the difference. This was cutting very close to the line of insulting their guest. The assumption behind the passport was that, for temporary purposes, Jim owned the gems in it, and therefore was a dragon to be treated with the utmost respect.
"Where're you going from here?" Maigra asked suddenly in her sharp voice, breaking into and putting an end to Sorpil's no doubt largely-embroidered account of how he had conquered the château.
"East," said Jim with deliberate vagueness, coiling himself up more comfortably on the floor around the end of the george-sized table. The eating was over now, and Jim had taken enough of the wine, even as a dragon, to begin to feel rather relaxed and comfortable. He judged that the keg Sorpil had broached was at least half empty by this time.
"But I mean by what way, what route?" demanded Maigra.
"Oh," said Jim, "I thought I'd just pick my way generally eastward, you know. I'm not particular about exactly which route I travel."
"Well, you ought to be!" said Maigra. "After over a hundred years with no one but us to rule them, the peasants for miles around have gotten very bold. Sorpil and I never touch land outside unless we're together. Twenty or thirty peasants attacking you all at once with pitchforks and reaping hooks and things like that if you're alone—particularly if you're a little dragon like I am—is something you need to take seriously."
"Well, if you'll tell me the limits of your territory," said Jim, "I'll simply fly beyond them before I go down to earth. Not but what I don't think I could probably handle even twenty or thirty armed peasants if I had to."
In spite of himself, the wine was bringing out some of Jim's instinctive dragon's pride in his own size and power. In fact, right now in a sleepy, wine-induced, sort of way, he found rather attractive the idea of having to deal with twenty or thirty armed peasants. He had little doubt that he could kill a good number of them and drive the rest off.
He remembered the first time he had flown into a mounted group of men-at-arms belonging to Hugh de Bois de Malencontri, the former owner of his castle and then his enemy, and scattered them like tenpins. Of course, that had been before Sir Hugh, in armor, on a war-horse and with a lance, had taught him that there were situations in which even a dragon might want to back off from a single george—human, that was.
The memory of the spear he had gotten through him on that occasion, that had nearly taken his life and the life of Gorbash, who owned the body he had been in, had a sobering effect on him.
"What do you suggest?" he asked Maigra.
"Well, to start off with," she answered, "you should let me tell you the best way to go, the safest way to go. Then you should travel on foot, so you can't be seen by a lot of peasants from underneath, so that they can gather and lay in wait for you. Now the best route for you after you leave here, would be through the woods to our northwest and then back again to a westerly line until you come to a large lake."
She paused to see if he was following her.
"Go on," he said.
"Follow the edge of that lake around it on your way west," she said. "For some reason the local peasants aren't as likely to attack you if you're close to the lake. None of them can swim; and of course none of them ever learned that we dragons are heavier than water and don't swim, either. So even if you are attacked you can jump into the lake itself—it's quite shallow near shore for someone like us; but it would be up to the neck on a george—and be safe from anything except what they might try to throw at you."
Jim grinned a little wickedly inside himself. Maigra did not know that he was that anomaly, a dragon who could and would swim. He found this out when crossing the Fens on foot on his way to the Loathly Tower, where he had had to swim to get from one piece of land to another. He had not learned yet, then, that his dragon body would be heavier than water, so he had tried to swim across a stretch of water without thinking. Once in the water, after the first moment of panic, he had discovered that if he simply moved his legs and tail hard enough—swishing his tail back and forth the way a sea serpent would—he could not only keep afloat but make progress. It was tiring; but it was possible. No other dragon that Jim knew had ever attempted it; and all of them believed firmly that they would go to the bottom like a stone if they stepped into water too deep for them to stand up and keep their head out in the air.
Nonetheless, Maigra's advice, he decided, was good. He mentally apologized to her for thinking that neither she nor Sorpil had any real interest in being useful to him. It had been a natural assumption, dragon nature being what it was; since if anything happened to him, they got to keep the passport. On the other hand, she had also had a number of pitchersful of the wine from the keg; and maybe the alcohol had softened her up, also.
She must have had an attractive and gentler side, at least when she was younger, he thought. It did not stand to reason that someone like Sorpil, who would have been a mighty dragon when they both were young, would have married her otherwise.
"Thank you, Maigra," he said; and heard the words come out very sleepily indeed. It had been before noon when he had entered the château; but their eating and drinking, as was usual with dragons when they got down to it, had been an extensive affair. The moonlight should have warned him that they had been at it for eight or nine hours. Still, the time had rather seemed to have flown.
In any case, he was undeniably sleepy.
"Have you got a spot for me," he asked, "or shall I just curl up here?"
He had no great objection to curling up where he was. On the other hand, it was dragon instinct to find a small enclosed place in which to sleep. It would be only hostly of Sorpil and Maigra to find him such a place—possibly one of the smaller original rooms of the castle, no matter in what condition it was now.
"I'll show you a spot!" said Maigra, getting to her feet rather spryly.
Sorpil stayed where he was, merely rumbling something that sounded like "good night" intermixed with a dragon-sized belch. Jim followed Maigra off. She led him through a number of corridors and up and down several staircases, all in almost complete darkness. But with his nose and ears telling him where she was, Jim followed her without any worry of making a misstep or going astray.
She brought him at last to what Jim had expected, a bedroom of one of the original inhabitants of the castle. She left him there, and he curled up among the ruins of its original, rather sparse furniture. His last thought before falling asleep was that castles in France seemed to have more individual rooms than
castles in England.
He slept, as all dragons normally did, dreamlessly and soundly. When he awoke the room was bright with daylight. It had only one slit of a window, but the sun seemed to be beaming directly through it, so that the room was probably as bright as it ever got. The difference from the darkness of the night before was a little startling to Jim, to whom the hours between the moment when he fell asleep and this moment of waking seemed hardly more than an instant.
He yawned, his long red tongue flickering out is the dusty air of the room as his great jaws gaped. Then he uncoiled himself, stretched—all but his wings, there wasn’t room enough to stretch them—and by using his nose and memory together, followed back down the path he had been brought up the night before.
He found his way back to the room where they had eaten, drunk, and talked. Neither Maigra nor Sorpil was around. There was nothing left of the sheep, except a few bones cracked open, the marrow licked out of them. The keg Sorpil had opened the night before was four-fifths empty.
Jim treated himself to a pitcher of the wine, poured down at a gulp, and found it wonderfully revivifying. He had another, just on general principles.
It was probably time he got started. There would be nothing more to gain from his two hosts. Maigra, under the mellowing influence of the wine, had evidently given him the best advice he was likely to get from either one of them.
About to go out the double front doors, he turned for a last time and shouted a farewell to his hosts, since neither had bothered to show up to see him off.
"This is James!" Jim shouted. "I'm leaving now. Thank you for your hospitality, and I'll be back to pick up the passport before too long. Farewell!"
His voice went off, echoing and reechoing from distant, and more distant yet, corners of the castle. No sound came back in return.
He turned and went out.
It was another hot, cloudless day. He started off on foot according to the directions that Maigra had given him. He was getting started at a later hour today due to the food and wine of the previous evening. He had slept well into midmorning.
Two hours later he sighted a patch of blue that was evidently one end of the lake Maigra had mentioned. He paused to concentrate on his panting.
He had been panting so heavily that anyone within fifty feet would have been able to hear him sounding like a steam locomotive on its way uphill. His jaws were wide open and his red tongue lolled limply from between his front teeth like a dispirited flag.
He had forgotten the plain and simple fact that dragons were not really built for foot travel. By nature they were creatures of the air if traveling had to be done. And the day was hot.
Something Jim had never had to consider before was the feet that dragons, with their nearly-impenetrable hide, had no sweat glands over the outer surface of their body, like a human or some animals. They got rid of excess heat by panting, the way a dog does. Unfortunately, they had a great deal more size and body weight than a dog, and therefore more mass. Movement like this on foot accumulated heat in the body rather quickly; and this particular day was not one in which heat dissipated easily.
Jim had simply not encountered this problem before. The two previous foot-trips he had made as a dragon had been in a cooler climate; and both times it had been under conditions in which he was emotionally wrought-up and not paying much attention to the effort of his travel.
The first time he had been frantic with worry over what might be happening to Angie as a prisoner in the Loathly Tower. The other had been on the abortive march to retake the castle of Malencontri from Sir Hugh. On that occasion he had been full of bitterness and self-hate. But the big difference between those trips and this one had been the temperature of the day. The march to Malencontri, in fact, had ended in a fairly heavy rain which had kept him cool.
In this case, however, there was nothing to take his attention off how extraordinarily hot, bothered, and uncomfortable he was feeling. In fact, he thought, standing there and panting, he was damned if he would put up with it anymore.
Maigra had naturally assumed that he had only two choices: to fly or to travel on foot; on his hind legs, specifically. She had not, of course, recognized that she was talking to a magician who was just temporarily wearing a dragon body and therefore had a third option: to turn back into his human form.
Jim wrote the necessary magical equation on the inside of his forehead; and a second later stood there, blessedly naked and radiating heat from all over his body, with the rope that had secured his belongings now hanging loosely from his much smaller neck and shoulders.
He took the burden off and dressed; retying one end of the rope around the cloth that held the wine flask and the food and then making the rest of the rope into a loose sling, that he slung over his head and off one shoulder, so that it hung off his opposite hip like a baldric above the handle of his poignard.
He might not now be in as good a shape to face the attack of half a dozen or more armed French peasants; but on the other hand he was nowhere near as conspicuous now as he had been walking along as a dragon.
Also, in case he really got attacked, there was always the option of turning back into his dragon form again for self-protection. If the local people were as ready to believe in magic as everybody else he had met in this world so far, the very feet of his turning into a dragon before their eyes would be enough to send them scattering.
He felt much better—except for a tremendous thirst, engendered not only by last night's wine but the pitchersful he had drunk this morning. Accordingly, he headed hastily on toward the lake, where he hoped to be able to fill himself to the brim with cool water.
The closer he got to the lake the more achingly clear and beautiful the taste of that cool water grew in his imagination. Finally, he could hardly stop himself from breaking into a run. He did not, not because he was afraid of building up too much body heat once more—he was cooling off rather nicely, as a matter of fact, in his human shape—but because a certain sense of pride stopped him.
Would Brian have burst into a run simply to cover the last few yards to water he would reach in a second or two anyway? No, thought Jim, his friend would disdain any such human weakness. In learning to be the fourteenth-century equivalent of a wartime officer, Jim should be capable of showing no less restraint. After all, it was not as if he were dying of thirst. He was simply parched from having drunk too much wine.
So he managed to walk sedately to a point on the lake edge where he could lie on the bank and reach over and drink from the surface. The water was just as attractively blue and beautiful as he had imagined. And the first few swallows were so delicious that he lost control after all and began to gulp the water up as quickly as he could.
Pausing at last for breath, he had time finally to notice how the water, once it had ceased being disturbed by his drinking, showed his own image staring back at him, it seemed, from just below the surface. He gazed at it, bemused—then suddenly stared at it in something much more than bemusement.
The face staring up at him was not his. It was the face of a beautiful girl with long blond hair. She was smiling up at him—or rather her face was smiling up at him—from what seemed only inches below the surface of the water. The image was far too sharp to be any kind of a hallucination.
"Wait a minute!" said Jim out loud, scrabbling up onto his hands and knees, but still staring into the water.
The face came out of the water, proving to be attached to a head and, as it emerged further, the complete rest of the beautiful girl. She smiled at him and his head swam.
"There you are, my love," she breathed. "Finally, you are here at last. Come with me."
Her voice tinkled softly in his ears. She reached out and wrapped one of her little hands around Jim's; and the next thing Jim knew—he had no clear idea of bow it happened—he was being towed down into the lake itself.
He had time to notice that the underwater banks of the lake were nowhere near as shallow as Maigra had said. They fell
precipitiously to an unknown depth; in feet, so far that he could not at this moment see the bottom below them. A dragon who believed he couldn't swim, felling or being pulled into this water, would sink immediately and drown without a hope.
But he had no time to dwell upon the perfidiousness of Maigra's directions; and the possibly unhappy end that he had avoided only because the warmth of the day had spurred him to change into a human being. He was too concerned with the fact that he was being steadily pulled deeper into the lake.
He could swim passably well in his human body. He had even been snorkeling in water fifteen or twenty feet deep. But at the present moment he had no face-mask, no snorkel, and for some strange reason, the girl's ability to draw him deep into the lake was completely irresistible. Even if he had struggled, he had the feeling that it would have done no good; and he had no will to struggle.
He would drown. It was inevitable.
No sooner had he thought this, however, than he realized that if he was going to drown he should have started to feel some symptoms of it by this time. He had assumed he was holding his breath; but he was not. He was breathing quite normally, here, underwater.
This made no sense at all. Either the water had been replaced by some sort of bubble of air around him, which was impossible. Or else he was breathing water as if it was air, which was even more impossible.
"It’s wonderful your turning up like this at last," the golden-haired girl was saying in front of him, without bothering to turn her head. "You're the last thing I was expecting. I had my eye on a nasty dragon that was getting closer and closer. Then suddenly he disappeared."
Her tone became thoughtful.
"I don't understand that at all," she said, more to herself than to Jim. "I’ve never known a dragon to do that before. And he was headed right for the lake, too. I could have drowned him so easily!"
"Why—why would you want to drown a dragon?" asked Jim bewilderedly.
"Why, because they're such nasty things!" said the girl. "Those great, ugly, batlike wings and scary hides. Ugh! Wish I knew a way to get rid of all of them. As it is I simply do what I can by drowning any who come close. I draw them to the water's edge with my magic; and then, of course, once I’ve laid hold of them they can't get away. I can pull them right into the water and—"