The Dragon and the Gnarly King

  Gorp regarded him for a second, and then started nuzzling the sand at his feet, as if looking for a blade of grass. There was none, and he gave up, raised his head, and stood, merely staring straight ahead. Dafydd's quiet mount had ignored the whole matter, and the sumpter-horse, carefully looking away from Blanchard so that the warhorse should not see, sneered. It had never been a particularly good-natured sumpter-horse.

  "Dafydd," said Jim, "are we free to just walk across this land of yours, now?"

  "I see no reason why not," said Dafydd calmly. "Also, you must not call it 'my land,' Sir James. I am of Wales. It is true that I have ties to some who dwell in the country before us there, but that is another matter."

  Too late, Jim remembered that Dafydd had sworn Brian and him to secrecy about his being heir to a title from this Drowned Land—the "Prince of the Sea-Washed Cliffs," they had learned it meant, translated into English. Implied in that request was a desire that his title down here not be mentioned to anyone in the world above.

  "Farewell, Rrrnlf, now, and thank you," said Dafydd, and, leading the sumpter horse as well as his own, he moved on toward the soft green of the grassland beyond the shore.

  "Certainly, wee Bowman," said Rrrnlf—and disappeared.

  Jim had paused at the land's edge to express somewhat more extensive thanks than Dafydd had given, and this was a more abrupt departure than he had expected. It made him wonder for a moment if he had offended the Sea Devil in some subtle way.

  However, Gorp was tugging at his reins, wanting to follow after the other horses. Jim, with Brian and Blanchard following, passed into the green land.

  "Oh! Look, Hill!" cried a small voice that Jim knew only too well. He looked to see two faces peering out from under the raincover on the sumpter horse's load. He swore, not quite enough under his breath, as it turned out.

  "Well now, damn it—" Jim was beginning, when Brian interrupted.

  "You did say, James," said Brian severely, behind him, "that they could come with us. You said nothing about them keeping silence; and you know that the Hob, at least, must be talking. Your people will never know where they are with you if you do not stay with your decisions. A knight—"

  "I know, I know," said Jim, holding up his hand to stop Brian. "I just forgot they were with us for the moment."

  That answer and his upraised hand effectively stopped what Brian had obviously been about to begin, an educational lecture on the management of servitors and followers. Jim had had enough lately of his own conscience questioning his handling of the folk of Malencontri. That conscience needed no help from other people. They went on together without any more words.

  "M'Lord," Hob's tiny voice came piping back to him from the back of the sumpter horse.

  "What is it now?" Jim was aware of the irritation in his voice.

  "Very sorry, m'Lord, but you wanted to be reminded to make us all the right size again," Hob said timidly.

  Jim had time to note that a stunned look had come to Brian's face, and all of them stopped abruptly. Before the others could say a word, Jim undid that particular piece of his magic.

  "Thank you, Hob." Jim said.

  Silent by mutual unspoken agreement, they continued on.

  To begin with, they only led the horses across an open meadow of long grass, but after a short way, they mounted and rode on across this open land, stretching away into the distance, and began to climb the lower heights they had seen at the horizon. In time, they came upon a track, or trail, which led them into a dirt road of wagon width, somewhat dusty, but with hoof and shoe marks of many passers-by.

  As they rode it grew in width; and eventually the bare earth thinned to reveal an underlayer of blocks of white stone, and it was not long before they were completely out of the dust and dirt, walking the horses on the white stones of a Roman road.

  "If I may pray forgiveness of you both," said Dafydd, "it were best I rode first while we are in this Land."

  "Certes," said Brian, agreeing with a readiness that surprised Jim, until his next words explained it. "Are you not of rank in this country?"

  "I am that," said Dafydd. "But I thank you for your courtesy, nonetheless." And with the words there came an undeniable change in his voice and manner.

  He took the lead, and they went on. Soon they began to meet people going on foot the other way, ordinary-looking people by their clothes: artisans, farmers, and the like. These all spoke to them cheerfully, in a language that Jim was pretty sure was not Cornish, and might not even be Welsh, although it had some of the singing quality that Welsh had to the ear of an English-speaker.

  Dafydd answered in the same tongue. He made no attempt to translate; and Jim assumed that it was merely wayside greetings being exchanged.

  As they proceeded, however, the traffic increased, both coming toward them and catching up from behind and passing them—for they were only walking the horses at a leisurely pace. It was all foot traffic, all people who beamed and called out as they passed; and finally Dafydd was reduced merely to waving and saying a single word in answer.

  It was about this time that Jim began to notice that in addition to the traffic on the road, people were coming to the road from the green areas on either side, as if from farms out of sight from the road.

  He turned about in his saddle and looked behind him. Beyond Blanchard's rump, he saw more people coming to the roadway from all points of the compass.

  Gradually, they were being surrounded. This crowd thickened, and moved with them, not on the road but parallel to it in the grass on either side; and all beaming. The greetings were scarcer now, but the people waved at Dafydd, who was now down to merely smiling back, so many were the signals from the crowd to him. Thick as the multitude became, however, it was careful to leave the full width of the roadway open to the three men and their horses.

  But then there came a different rhythm to Blanchard's hooves on the stone roadway behind Jim, and Brian drew up level with him.

  "What think you, James?" he said, in a low voice, leaning toward Jim, their conversation quite lost in the polite, low-voiced murmuring of the crowd and the noises of the horses' hooves against the stone. "Is there some matter here we should know about? Perhaps we should ask Dafydd. What think you?"

  "I don't know, Brian," Jim said. "Let me think about it a few moments longer."

  Brian waited. Jim looked closely at the people around them. They were all long-limbed like Dafydd, but otherwise had little in common, except that they were all suntanned, with the look of having spent years of their lives in active physical work.

  They did not quite have the bony, hard-muscled, near-starved look of many who worked the land above the waves. These people looked instead as if they had never suffered from lack of either sleep or food; and they all had an extraordinarily merry look about them—as if they had found a happiness in simply being alive.

  Now that they had stopped talking directly to Dafydd—perhaps out of a realization that he could not acknowledge everything said to him by so many—they were talking among themselves. The tones of their voices were joyous and laughter skipped back and forth—a delighted sort of laughter, however, not the kind of throaty explosion that enjoys a joke at someone's expense, only an acknowledgment of something worth enjoying and laughing about.

  "I've no idea how they all heard about us so fast," Jim said in a low voice to Brian, "but clearly it's Dafydd they've all come to see. Why don't I ride forward and speak to him, and you come behind me? We can both avoid jostling him too closely, but let me do the talking."

  "That is well thought of," said Brian. They moved their horses forward and Jim stopped about half a horse-length behind Dafydd and spoke to him from behind.

  "Dafydd," he said, "can you tell us what's going on here?"

  Dafydd answered without turning his head.

  "It is that they are glad to see me, for what I am in this land, only that," he said. "I chose this road, hoping to avoid just this. But it has come about regardless."


  "Should we take another road?" Jim asked.

  "This should still cause no problem, look you," went on Dafydd. "This is the way that will take us most shortly to Lyonesse; and without coming to any of the old cities, which are important places where people of rank dwell. It will not matter that those of the farm and countryside come around me in this manner. We will keep moving, and soon be gone; and they will have perhaps a memory to talk about—but no more."

  He paused, but did not point. "Do you see where the ground ahead rises and the road is cut through for some distance along the base of the mountains? From there on, there will not be room for large crowds on either hand. That cut will last for some miles, and these with us now will not follow. Then we will pass into a forest; and at its far end we will come to the border of Lyonesse."

  "What do you want us to do, then?" Jim asked.

  "Only to ride on as you are now," said Dafydd, now turning to look back at his companions for the first time. "Though I pray you favor me by staying back, that the people watching may be happier."

  "Certainly," said Jim. Dafydd's face was strangely serious, his mouth a thin, straight line, his eyes looking at them with an unusual authority. Brian's own gaze sharpened. But Jim and Brian fell back without a word, and went on side by side.

  "We might as well have each other for company, Brian," Jim murmured. "Chances are these people can't understand us anyway."

  "There is that, James," said Brian.

  Yet they rode in silence until they came to the cut, and the ground began to rise on either side of them.

  There, in spite of Dafydd's prediction, the hillsides were still clustered with people, particularly on the less steep lower slopes. Meanwhile, in the open land they had left behind them, the people were dispersing; then were lost completely to sight as the hitherto ruler-straight road began to wind between the hills, and it was only possible to see for short distances ahead of them.

  The sun still shone brightly, however. It and the good humor of the crowd seemed to have infected even the sumpter-horse, now following after Dafydd with its head-rope dragging forgotten on the ground—as if it would trail him like a loving dog, wherever he might choose to go.

  The slopes grew steeper and less hospitable, their tops seeming closer; yet they remained crowded with standing, waving people. The road curved more and more frequently—and, without warning, around a curve ahead of them came four men, two abreast, on beautiful horses much lighter of bone than either Gorp or Blanchard.

  The men seemed to be warriors of some old-fashioned kind, clad in armor of boiled leather, reinforced by plates of metal, and wearing antique helmets with only a nasal bar to cover an open face area. Each carried a spear, and swords hung at their sides. All their horses were white.

  Just behind them came two more pairs of white horses, a team pulling at a trot an open carriage, like a barouche, with the driver's seat outside and facing seats within. Only one person sat in it: an old man, clean-shaven, erect in the middle of the backseat. The carriage itself was golden, glittering as if it had been covered with the precious metal itself. Behind it came, two by two, more mounted and armored spearmen.

  Dafydd reined in his horse. It stopped, the sumpter-horse stopped, and both Jim and Brian reined in their own mounts. They sat waiting, until the leading riders came almost up to Dafydd before swinging out to take station on each side, facing inward to the road. The horses of the carriage pulled it right to Dafydd, who dismounted and walked slowly to the barouche, and spoke in the same tongue that Jim and Brian had been listening to for some time now.

  "Perhaps," said Brian softly out of the corner of his mouth to Jim, while keeping his face straight forward, "this is somewhat in which we also should be concerned?"

  "Maybe we ought to wait a few minutes," Jim was answering, in the same fashion, when Dafydd turned, looked at them, and waved them forward.

  Brian swung out of his saddle, and Jim imitated him, getting down from Gorp. Both warhorses were used to standing ground-hitched, with their reins dangling in front of them, without moving; and both Brian and Jim left them without concern, going forward to join Dafydd at the carriage.

  "You will be leaving with—" To Jim's astonishment, the old man in the carriage spoke in perfectly comprehensible English, except that his last word, or words, were Dafydd's ancient title, in their ancient tongue,"—I would wish you to hear this."

  "My Lord King of this Land," said Dafydd, speaking to the old man, but also in English, "may I make known to you my Lord Sir James Eckert, Baron de Bois de Malencontri et Riveroak, and Sir Brian Neville-Smythe of Castle Smythe, both of the Saxon lands."

  "I am pleased to lay eyes upon them," said the King to Dafydd; and turned back to Jim and Brian.

  "Something of your names and deeds have sunk down to us even here in our special Kingdom," he went on. "From what I have heard, and from what Dafydd has said, you are good men and true. I would that you understand that, although no doubt you came here with no harm intended, your coming has created a problem, and I must speak with—" Once more, he pronounced the title that Dafydd held among these people. "I trust you to believe me when I say we bear you no ill-will, nor is there any ill-will toward he to whom I am now about to speak. Will you favor me, gentlemen, by waiting here, while the two of us discuss this privately?"

  "Sire," said Brian, "I will be glad to."

  "So will I," said Jim.

  "Good."

  Jim heard no order given, but a horseman behind the carriage leaped down and ran forward to open a door in its side. He took the arm of the older man as the latter pulled himself to his feet and came slowly down steps that had emerged from the side of the carriage. He kept his hold as the old King stepped unsteadily down to the earth.

  Beside the road, for a short space the slope was gentle before rising more steeply to the hilltop. The hillside was now empty, clear of people to the point where the green crest of the hill was sharp against the cloudless, seemingly infinite, sky. On the gentle slope, Dafydd and the King walked off a little distance, and began to pace backward and forward in unheard conversation.

  The old man stepped slowly and uncertainly; and occasionally, Dafydd's hand closed on his elbow to steady him. Clearly, the King had been a tall man once—possibly even a little taller than Dafydd—but age had stolen the stoutness of his bones and bent him, to the point where he seemed half-ahead shorter than the younger man. Nonetheless, it was clear which one was the King, as the two walked together.

  Brian and Jim stood and waited, as did the horses, the armored riders, and the people on the other hillsides; and a hush was over everything, in which it was barely possible to hear that Dafydd and the King were speaking, like the murmuring of a running stream, around a corner and just out of sight.

  As he and Brian stood, watching and waiting, a movement above caught Jim's attention. He lifted his gaze to the crest of the open slope, where a man had appeared and was now outlined against the sky—a man as tall as Dafydd and also with a bow-stave slung over his shoulder. He was dressed in a cap, jacket, and hose, all of a light blue. He stood motionless, merely looking down at the two walking below; but at the same moment some twenty or so of the mounted spearmen galloped from behind the carriage to form a semicircle about the space where the King and Dafydd had walked, facing up against the slope.

  The man in light blue made no move, but after a moment he was joined, a little to his left, by another bow-carrying figure—and, one by one, more and more figures identically dressed and armed appeared along the crest of the hill.

  The spearmen on horseback waited without moving. The archers in blue on the crest of the hill waited, looking down. Dafydd, with the aged King, continued a slow walk back and forth, and their talk.

  Chapter Twenty

  The two of them—King and Bowman-Prince—continued to talk. Brian and Jim waited. The guard of the King's spearmen waited. The archers on the hill waited. In the farther distance waited the people who had flocked from so far
around to be close to Dafydd.

  Now there came moments when the King began to walk with a longer stride, like one used to covering long distances on foot, vigorously and in his full strength. But then his step would falter again; and once more Jim would see Dafydd's hand steadying the older man.

  Finally, they stopped. They stood talking in place a moment longer before Dafydd turned to beckon Jim and Brian.

  They two had returned to their horses—Brian, with a warrior's instinct, had remounted when the spearmen moved out, and Jim had followed without thinking much about it. Now they dismounted once more and walked to Dafydd and the King. Close up, the King's face was grey with tiredness. But it was he who spoke, however, and his voice was still firm, if low-pitched, as if to keep the conversation private even from his guards.

  "Dafydd tells me," he said, "the three of you are only passing through our Land to the border of Lyonesse, you, Sir James, hoping there to find your lost ward."

  "That's right," answered Jim.

  "I have delayed you in your search this long," said the King, in a voice that began to have a hoarseness in it, "to entreat"—again came Dafydd's title—"not go on with you, but stay with us, here on the earth that has been that of his elder family since time immemorial. But he says he cannot, that he must go on with you." He paused to cough lightly.

  "I would ordinarily entreat you also, my Lord James Eckert," he went on, "to free him from any duty he has to accompany you, so that he could stay—except that I understand that there is something more than duty here involved. Therefore, I will importune him no more, but stand aside to let you all pass, wishing that God may be with you once you have crossed into Lyonesse."

  The last words came out noticeably ragged with emotion.

  "I'm sorry—" Jim began—but saw Dafydd, standing back a little from the King, shaking his head. "But certainly Sir Brian and I must go on, and Dafydd must come with us if that's his choice. You speak as if our going into Lyonesse were something with a good deal of danger in it."

  "Whether you will find your ward there, I do not know," said the King. "It is a land of old Magicks, and some that may not be magick. The strangest of all the Other Kingdoms. Whether it is an old land of Faery—as some say—or not, I do not know. But I do know there are perils, other than weapons and foes."