The Dragon in Lyonesse

  Dafydd's use of the formal "Sir" toward both of them when they three were alone together, plus the bowman's slight emphasis on "companionable," woke Brian now to the meaning of what Jim had said.

  "Of course!" he said. "Well thought on, James!"

  Jim heard noises in the blackness and then Brian's voice barely murmured in his ear.

  "Have you a plan, James?"

  "In a way," said Jim, equally quietly. "But now that they've left us alone—Dafydd, are you there?"

  "I am," said Dafydd's voice softly near Jim's other ear. He had made his move to Jim's side much more silently than Brian had.

  "—Not a definite plan yet," Jim told them both. "But I think as long as no one can see us, we ought to see if we can't get out of these ropes. I thought if we got back to back, maybe we could untie each other's wrists."

  "Why not, indeed!" said Brian. "I think… James, you will not be offended if I suggest that it is Dafydd and I who should try to untie each other first. You see, one must wait, in any way, and it may be that of the three of us, Dafydd and I may have somewhat greater finger and arm strength—"

  "Oh, certainly, certainly!" said Jim; although he had actually been taking for granted that he would be one of the first two to be untied. "I'll just slide out from between both of you, here. Just a minute."

  "Why do you not stay as you are, James?" said Dafydd. "I have done things not unlike this moving over the ground with my hands and feet tied before; and I can be at Brian's back quickly."

  His low voice was altering its position, even as he spoke; and, a moment later, it was talking from Brian's side of Jim.

  "If you would hold your wrists steady now, Brian. Again, from experience, I have found that work goes fastest on unmoving cords. If you have some practice in using the fingers so, they quickly come to know where to reach all they have touched before."

  Brian grunted.

  Jim lay in the silent darkness, wishing he had some nonmagical way of seeing how Dafydd's efforts to untie Brian's wrist ropes were going. But there was none; and neither Brian nor Dafydd was likely to make sounds that would let him know—Brian, out of a lifetime's training in ignoring discomfort, and Dafydd from probably close to a lifetime of training in doing such things without a sound.

  After what seemed a long wait, broken only by a sort of soft shuffling noise outside and behind the tent, Dafydd's voice broke the silence.

  "I am afraid," he said, "I can do nothing. These knots were drawn tight by a man who had the use of his arm muscles to do so. Because my own wrists are tied, I cannot pull the strands apart to start a loosening. Forgive me for raising your hopes, only to fail you both."

  "Never think so, Dafydd," said Brian. "If you cannot untie my knots, then none of us can. Though I will try, in case my good name Saint should favor me with a small miracle, if the two of you would wish it. Also it may be that your bonds are less tight—" Dafydd hissed suddenly for silence. Brian broke off in mid-sentence and Jim held his breath. The shuffling noise had grown slightly louder, but also it seemed closer. As they listened, it stopped suddenly.

  Utter soundlessness for a second.

  Then, a soft, rubbing noise, very close to Jim, who was the farthest in from the door to the tent. The noise had come from the back wall of the tent, only feet behind him.

  But before he could twist his body around and roll over so that he could at least face in that direction—even if he could see nothing—a rough, wet tongue licked his face; and there was a faint whimper that sounded familiar.

  "QB?" murmured Jim. "Is that you?"

  Another identical whimper.

  "If you know where to get us some help, get it," said Jim. "Otherwise you'd better get out yourself—"

  "It's all right, m'Lord," said a small, breathy voice in Jim's ear. "M'Lord QB's been leading me. In the dark we can walk right by these men and they never knew we were there."

  Brian and Dafydd were silent, listening.

  "But how—" Jim broke off. "What do you mean, leading you? Can he see in the dark?"

  "Oh no, m'Lord, not in his own body or the hound body he's in now. He uses his nose."

  "Oh," said Jim. Of course. Both wolves and domestic dogs—and dogs, for that matter, were actually wolves, only "socialized," as an academic friend who had studied them had once pointed out—saw the world around them only in black and white. But their remarkable power of scent allowed them to read the world in a whole spectrum of odors humans missed. Of course, a hound could make his way about a camp like this on a moonless night, with his nose giving him as good an awareness of nearby people and tents as daylight might to humans—except for colors, of course.

  "We knew we'd get a chance to speak to you, finally," Hob was going on. "There's no one else around at all now. He just dug under the cloth of the tent. Now, we'll turn you all loose. He's chewing on the rope about your wrists now, m'Lord."

  "I know," said Jim, who was being jerked one way and another as the hound alternately chewed on the ropes or set his teeth in one of them and tried to pull it loose. "How's he doing?"

  But at that moment, Jim felt the ropes fall away.

  "Good," he said, massaging his wrists and flexing his fingers. They did not hurt, what with his earlier antipain personal magic; but they felt a little numb. The ropes must have been tight. "Where's the QB now?" he asked the darkness.

  "He's biting loose Sir Brian, m'Lord."

  "Dafydd," said Jim. "Say something so I can find you. I can work on your ropes while the QB works on Brian's."

  "I am a little toward the tent front and ahead of you, James."

  Jim tried to get to his feet, and immediately fell over.

  "My ankles are still tied!" he announced, as much to the QB and Hob as to Dafydd.

  "Do you still have your little knife with you?" came the voice of Brian. Jim was glad of the darkness that hid what he was sure was a look of embarrassment. Outside of an eating knife, sword, and dagger, a knight was supposed to be above needing to carry any other weapons, particularly hidden ones. Brian, however, had disabused him of taking this commandment too literally. What if you should encounter with some unknightly person? he had pointed out quite reasonably.

  Jim's visible weapons had, of course, been taken from him; but his little hideout knife was still tucked into its hidden pocket on the inside of his belt.

  "I'll be right with you," he said to Dafydd, sawing on the ropes around his ankles with the small blade. The ropes parted; and he began to feel his way toward the archer.

  "My thanks to you, James," said Dafydd, as his ropes were cut.

  "Don't thank me," said Jim. "It's the QB who's turned us all loose. Brian? I can cut your ropes now."

  "Needs not," said Brian with a grunt. "I have my own small knife in hand, now; and—there goes the last of my ankle bindings."

  "Then best we leave this place as quickly as we can," said Dafydd.

  "If I may say so," said the unexpected, normal voice of the QB, himself, "best that you hear what Hob and I have to tell you before we venture out. I will be a hound again in a moment: I just turned into myself so I could speak with you; and, I hope, lead you safely to your horses. But first you should listen—"

  "The horses, yes!" said Brian. "Blanchard! I will not leave here without him. But our weapons, what of our weapons? We would travel naked—without them!"

  "We found those, too," piped up Hob. "There was a dying campfire in the open with no one around it; and I managed to get to it and ride off on a waft of its smoke, just as though I was going from a fireplace back at Malencontri. I went over the horse lines from end to end—Blanchard and the rest are at the end we were all going to when the men took you prisoner."

  "But our weapons!"

  "Sir Hugh kept them, Sir Brian. It was all but certain he would," broke in the QB. "Of your favor, Hob, I'd like to tell the important information first."

  "Important?" said Brian. "More important than Blanchard and our weapons… I crave pardon, my Lord QB, you
were saying?"

  "There is no need for any to crave my pardon. But it is important you know that after it grew to nightfall here, I stole back from where I had slipped off to, as a hound; and found that Hob had left his hiding place under the cloth covering the load of the sumpter horse as soon as the crowd of men who took you prisoner had carried you off. Unobserved, for twilight had already begun to fall, he was seeking the place where you had been taken."

  "Well done, Hob!" said Brian.

  "My humble thanks, Sir Brian!"

  Jim could almost feel the warmth of the little creature, swelling with pride at the compliment. "What did you think of my—" Hob began.

  "As I was about to say," interrupted the QB once more, "together, we returned to the tent of Sir Hugh de Bois; but although my hound nose told me that you had been there recently, you were not there—though we found your weapons as I have said. But I followed your scent moving away from his tent, to a larger tent where you were talking to a lady and gentleman. That is the important matter; for with my hound's nose I smelled, from beneath a back wall of the tent, not only those two but another man hidden behind them—a man I knew."

  "Ah, the man I saw in the shadows," said Jim.

  "It may be so."

  "Who is he?"

  "Someone I never expected to see again. You may remember I said that in the past no one but our King Arthur could raise armies. I was wrong. There was one other: he who had in truth raised armies to fight against Arthur in our great King's old age—armies stiffened with those of Arthur's knights who fell away from him over the sins of which Guinevere was accused. It was his unluckily begotten son by another than Guinevere. His name is Modred."

  "Modred," said both Jim and Brian—thoughtfully on Jim's part, but questioningly on the part of Brian. The QB had evidently heard the latter as well.

  "Did you not know, Sir Brian," his voice said, "how Gawain, driven by hate for Lancelot, kept telling the King that Lancelot, overseas in his own domain, was raising great armies against him; and therefore, in the end, Arthur left his kingdom in the charge of Modred, and went with a great army of his own, but with a heavy heart, to France, to attack the lands of Lancelot?"

  "Meseems to me now I did hear the tale of something like that," said Brian. "But it was when I was very young; and I do not remember well what came of it."

  "Lancelot would not fight Arthur, and the King was loath to shed the blood of so many of his fellowship. Then, while all hung in the balance, came news from Arthur's realm that Modred, as Regent back in England, had claimed that the King had fallen in battle with Lancelot; and proclaimed himself King in Arthur's place. So Arthur came back and won one fierce battle at Dover against a larger force led by Modred. A treaty was agreed upon to fight no more, providing no man on either side drew his sword."

  "It comes back to me now," said Brian's voice. "It was a knight of the King's side who was bitten in the foot by an adder, and drew his sword to kill it. Modred saw the flash of that sword and led his army against the King, so that at last the field was sown only with dead men—but the King saw Modred, and rushed at him with a spear—was not that the way of it?"

  "It was. The spear pierced Modred through for half its length; and he, feeling his death-wound, thrust himself up the shaft of the spear with the life remaining in him, and struck his father with his sword, so that it pierced both helm and brainpan."

  "So that he was wounded near to Death," said Brian, almost in the same tone of voice, as if he was making a habit-engraved response in church, "and three Queens in a boat came to take him to the Vale of Avalon. Is that not how it went? But Modred, it comes to me now—Modred was ended by that spear blow."

  "So he was," the QB said. "He fell down dead. I never expected to see him alive again; but in this latest trouble, many of those who died in the time of our legends have now returned—King Pellinore's two sons among them.

  "Perhaps it is an act of the Old Magic which keeps our Originals, those Knights from the Table Round, still living—though their descendants bear their names and ride the Wood of Rencontres, where you first met me. But my hound's nose, which had smelled Modred at Arthur's Court aforetime, knew him," wound up the QB, "as I sniffed under the wall of the tent and you talked to the Lord and Lady at the table."

  "Hadn't we better be going?" Jim said. "We can talk more when we're in a safer place."

  "Indeed," said Dafydd. "And, more than that, I must be taking word of this back to my own King and people as swiftly as possible."

  "While I must carry the same word to Lyonesse," said the QB, "and any other talking will have to be done with those who go with me. Will you come, James and Brian? After all, it was to help Lyonesse that you came, I understood."

  "I think we must, James," said Brian. "But if you have other word…"

  "No. We'd better go with the QB," said Jim.

  "Then, once we are well out of this camp and into open country," said Dafydd, "none will be able to find or catch us. Trust me for that. We will part then."

  "Yes," said Jim. "I'd hoped, after we came to the Drowned Land and found you again, we three'd be staying together for the rest of this mess. Things never go the way you think."

  "We are near the end of the horse lines, now," said the low voice.

  Now that they were away from the dimly lit tents, the voice came out of an impenetrable darkness; as far as Jim knew, the QB might not have bothered to change back to his hound shape. If not, he had been leading just with his natural ability to read the scents about them; but he had been leading them all as surely as a seeing-eye dog. "This end of it is less than a rod's distance from us now; and I can smell your Blanchard, Sir Brian, clearly."

  At less than sixteen and a half feet, Jim himself could now smell the horse lines. He could not, however, identify Blanchard's personal odor—the QB's normal nose might not equal his canine one, but clearly it was much better than a human's.

  Beside Jim—in fact, holding to his sword belt, so as not to go astray; just as Jim was hanging on to Dafydd, who seemed able to follow the QB without hanging on—Brian gave a low, almost soundless, whistle.

  Jim recognized it. It was one of the signals Brian had trained Blanchard to know: a warning not to greet his master with any sound. Jim had tried to train Gorp to the same response; but Gorp, who normally did not whinny at such times anyway, was not the student Blanchard had obviously been. He might just choose this moment to forget his training.

  "Hob," said Jim, low-voiced, "could you go ahead of us and keep Gorp and the sumpter horse quiet—or could you get lost if you try?"

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "A Hob never gets lost in the dark," said Hob's voice behind him. There was the faint scurry of small, shoeless feet out ahead—then silence. A moment later Jim literally walked into Gorp's wall-like side.

  All the horses, of course, had been relieved of all they carried—saddles, bridles, and the sumpter horse's load.

  "We must needs ride without gear and goods," said Brian wistfully. "But it were folly to go back and search for them at the risk of being retaken."

  "Perhaps not," said the QB. "At least I can try. My hound nose is better than the one I was made with; but perhaps leopard's nose is all we need here—" They heard him sniff. "The whole encampment is asleep, except for those few tents still lit within. If we stay clear of such tents you may as well ride—and be ready to escape with speed if necessary. Your horses need only follow me. I will lead you to safety. Hob, can you tell Blanchard to follow me in the dark? I do not know this land, but I can still sense the trees and the spaces between them."

  "Blanchard won't listen to me," said Hob, startling Jim by speaking from behind him on Gorp's back. "But I can tell Gorp my Lord said so to do, and then Gorp will listen and follow."

  "And Blanchard shall follow Gorp. My word on it!" said Brian's voice out of the darkness.

  "And you, my Lord Regent," came the QB's voice, "will your horse also follow?"

  "No," answered Dafydd's
voice, sounding as if he were smiling. "But I will listen to the hoof-falls of your horses, and guide mine along with the rest of you."

  "Then we go," said the QB; and go they did. There were a few moments of movement, then the QB stopped again. "We are close now—to what I assumed must be."

  They went forward again. After another small distance, he slowed and stopped again.

  "You cannot see it yet," he said in a low voice. "For that matter, neither can I. But this is the tent holding Sir Hugh de Bois's extra gear. I have followed my nose to the tarred cover on the load your sumpter horse carried. Now that I am close I can smell your saddles as well, along with other equipage that may belong to Sir Hugh, or perhaps to a number of knights. There is one man on duty inside it, as night guard."

  "I will take care of him," said Dafydd.

  "No. There is no need. He has drunk himself to sleep. Let us go softly; and each of you keep a hand on my back. We will go in and carry out what is yours."

  They did so. With the QB's nose to guide them through the blackness of the tents interior, it was a simple enough labor. They outfitted their horses, swung into their saddles, and were ready to ride.

  Now that all the difficult work was over, the first paling of the morning sky announced that the night here, as short as that of Lyonesse, was all but over.

  "The encampment still sleeps," said the QB. "Follow me now."

  They followed. In no time at all they were surrounded by forest and trotting their horses behind a QB whose energy seemed limitless. They rode for what Jim judged to be almost a half hour. The sun was still not yet lifted above the tops of the surrounding trees, but overhead the sky was white with dawn, and at ground level they could see clearly where they were going.

  "How much farther to Lyonesse?" Jim finally asked the QB.

  "We have been there for some time," the latter answered, without turning his head. "Look where the first edge of the sun now rises between the thinner upper branches of the trees."