The Dragon and The George

  He began to use his wings again, and his pressure points signaled that he was once more gaining altitude, though at a slow rate. His mind, working at a steady white heat from the moment he had decided to leave the sandmirks on the ground behind, now tossed something at him out of the very back of his reading experience: a passage from a very old book dealing with somebody lost underwater who no longer knew even which way was up to the surface. He had thought, when he had read that passage, that what, was needed in such a situation was some sort of diver's personal sonar. That memory triggered off in his mind the recollection that not only was his dragon-voice of unusual proportions but his eyesight and hearing were unhumanly sensitive. Bats could fly blind at night, or even—as experimenters had discovered—when the animals had been physically blinded, because of their echo-sounding—their sonar. What if he could do something like that?

  Jim opened his mouth, gathered the full force of his lungs, and sent a wordless cry booming out into the falling rain and darkness around him.

  He listened…

  He was not sure whether he had heard anything echoing back at him.

  He boomed again. And listened… and listened… straining his ears.

  This time, he thought he heard an echo of some sort.

  Once more he boomed, and once more he listened. This time, clearly, an echo returned. Something was below him and off to his right.

  Lowering his head toward the ground below, he boomed again.

  His dragon-hearing was evidently quick to learn. This time he was able to make out, not only a general echo, but some differences in the areas from which the echoes came. Far to his right, the response was soft, close to his right it was sharp, and far to his left it became soft again. If these were any indication, they should signal a hard surface almost directly underneath him.

  He checked on that thought. It was not so likely that the echoes indicated hard surface, as that they did a reflective one. This could mean that right under him was an area of open land, while to right and left were areas where tree growth interfered with echo response. He stopped experimenting and resumed flying, while he thought this out. The real problem, he told himself, was to discover if he could determine the distances between himself and the source of the echoes. A sort of glee ran through him. It was not that, even now, he had any real belief in his ability to save himself—win an overall victory against the sandmirks. He was merely doing something about his situation.

  He flew for a while, again deliberately trying to gain altitude—enough so that he would be able to tell by what he heard whether there was any real difference between the echoes he had caught at a lower altitude. He once again stiffened his wings into soaring position and sent his pulse of sound winging into the rain-drenched darkness.

  The echoes came back—and for the first time hope leaped up within Jim. For what he was hearing was essentially the same distribution of strong echoes and weak—indications of high reflective surfaces adjoining softly reflective ones—in the same directions in which he had found them before, but with a very clear weakening of the echoes—an obvious indication that the echoes' strength might be usable as indexes to his height.

  He was now caught up in what he was doing. A fever of optimism burned inside him. The odds were still large against his being able to learn anything in time to let him land safely; but the odds had been astronomical against him before.

  He continued alternately to fly, soar, experiment with changes in altitude. His life-and-death situation helped him learn: his ability to interpret what he was hearing was growing by leaps and bounds. Not merely was his hearing becoming more sensitive, but also more selective; so that he was able to distinguish not merely two types of surfaces below him, but perhaps half a dozen—including a thin streak of sharp, almost metallic echo which might indicate a stream or river.

  Also, little by little, his skill in using the information from the echoes was increasing. Gradually building in his mind, like the negative of a photograph, was an image of the area below. He could now ignore two sounds which—had he considered them earlier—might have kept him from trying the experiment: the noise of the falling rain, hissing around him, and the steady sound of it beating on the earth below. His dragon-hearing apparently was capable of control by conscious intent.

  For a moment it crossed Jim's mind that dragons might have more in common with bats than was generally thought. Certainly their wings were like enormous bat wings. If he was able to do what he was now doing, possibly any dragon could; and it was surprising that most dragons believed nighttime to be a time when they could not fly unless by a bright moon.

  Of course, he remembered, dragons obviously had a different orientation to darkness than humans did. He remembered how he had felt in the dragon caves—he had not had so much as a touch of claustrophobia. As a dragon, he did not mind being underground, or enclosed in darkness. Similarly, in the cellar of Dick Innkeeper, the fact that the torch had gone out while he was eating had left him completely undisturbed. Darkness as such, and the inability to see, held no terrors for him. It struck him now that the real reason for other dragons' fear of flying at night, when they could not see, was that for them aboveground was considered a strange and possibly dangerous place; and the lack of light to fly by was a good excuse not to go there. Gorbash, Jim remembered, was thought of as an almost unnatural dragon for spending so much time aboveground. Now, Gorbash's abnormal attitude, complemented by Jim's normal human attitude that the surface was a good place on which to be, opened up a whole new dimension in dragon night travel.

  Meanwhile, although he was gaining more and more control over his situation, Jim had no way of judging his altitude. It did no good to know that he was getting closer and closer to the ground, if he had no way of guessing when getting close changed abruptly to being there!

  It occurred to him that he had only one solution: he could fly down toward the stronger echoes, coming as close to their source as he dared, and hope that when he got very near there would be enough light—even on this dark night—for him to pull up at the last moment. The attempt would be a bit like playing Russian roulette; but what other choice had he?

  Putting himself into the shallowest of glide paths, he began to descend. As he did, inspiration came to him for a second time. He remembered the streak of particularly sharp echoes and his own guess that it might represent a river or creek, with a highly sound-reflective surface. He altered his path slightly toward that particular echo. If he was fated to crashland, he would have more hope if he came down on water than on earth or into a grove of sharp-branched trees.

  He continued his descent, sending out pulses of sound as he went. The echoes came back, more and more sharply, more and more swiftly. Straining his eyes, he peered ahead; but all he could see was blackness. Closer he came, and closer—and still he could see absolutely nothing.

  Abruptly, he pulled up; and as he did so his tail, hanging down behind him, splashed through water. A split second later he was climbing again, and cursing his own stupidity.

  Of course, dammit! Voice, ears—he had completely forgotten nose. Suddenly he had smelled water! His dragon-olfactory sense might be no match for Aragh's superb physical instrument, but it was a great deal more sensitive than a human's. He checked his climbing instinctively and went again into a shallow glide, once more aimed toward the water echo below. But this time he paid attention to the odors reaching his nose.

  Conscious awareness, he found himself thinking, was a wonderful thing. What he now identified through his nostrils should have been apparent to him on the way down before, but because he had not been expecting to use his sense of smell to orient himself, he had paid no attention. Now, deliberately sniffing, he smelled not only water, but grass, pine needles, leaves and the damp earth itself.

  Coming down over what he now knew was water, he smelled soil to right and left of it. He had been right: it was a small river, perhaps fifty yards wide. He descended until his tail touched water, and then ros
e a little and drifted toward the smell of earth on the right. He glided at an angle toward it, and—

  Oops! He pulled up just in time as he smelled a stand of elm trees rising thirty feet into the air above the right bank, directly in his path. Beyond them was a scent of grass and earth. He glided down again above the bank's edge beyond the trees, veered just off it over the water, once more—

  And pancaked into the liquid below.

  Jim made a tremendous splash. But the water by the bank turned out to be only shoulder-deep on him—perhaps the height of a man. He stood in the stream for a moment, the cool liquid streaming slowly around him, savoring the simple feeling of being safely on the surface of the earth again.

  After a few moments, the rapid beating of his heart slowed and he turned and climbed out of the water onto the bank, his head dizzy with success.

  It occurred to him, tantalizingly, that he might even have succeeded in coming down safely on the bank itself. Then he rejected the thought. Landing on something solid was more than a bit risky. It would be wiser to wait until he had practiced these new nighttime skills some more.

  His headiness began to fade. It was a great thing to be alive and to have escaped the sandmirks, but he was still without Companions or a plan of action.

  He was no strong staff for Angie to lean her hopes of rescue on, he thought now, in guilty reaction; but he was all she had. Briefly, he thought of waiting until morning and then taking wing to see if he could find Brian and the rest. Then he remembered how he had already promised to help them take Hugh de Bois' castle first. His change of heart would probably be excuse enough for the troupe to consider itself free of any obligation to help him with Angie. Even if they didn't, he now realized how far he was from understanding his strange new friends. All of them, even the humans, thought and acted according to standards entirely different from his. It was a sobering example of how one could speak the same language as someone else without being on the same mental wavelength at all.

  He needed to get straightened out on the way his medieval friends thought and felt, before he made any more mistakes about them and this world; and the obvious person to help him was Carolinus.

  He lifted his head. It had almost stopped raining while he was coming in for a landing and during these heavy thoughts. In fact, the clouds seemed to be thinning a trifle. He thought he saw a milky gleam behind one patch of them that could be the moonlight struggling to get through.

  If the moon came out—or even if it didn't, he thought, now—he ought to be able, once airborne, to locate the Tinkling Water again. His wing muscles, which had been tiring while he tried to interpret the echoes he heard from the ground, now felt rested once more—another instance of the amazing dragon-strength and endurance. It was too bad dragons could not be studied by competent physiologists, zoologists and doctors of veterinary medicine to find out how they managed to have such physical gifts.

  Jim took off with a bound into the now-rainless air—and a little afterward, as he soared in a direction he could only hope was toward Carolinus' cottage, the moon came out to reveal the silver-black landscape about nine hundred feet below him. Five minutes later the sky was all but clear and he was in a long glide toward the woods holding the Tinkling Water, which he could see now, less than two miles ahead of him. He had only been off in his heading by about five compass points.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Among patches of white moonlight and India-ink shadows, Jim landed with a thump on the gravel path leading to Carolinus' front door. Far off in the woods some sleepy bird clucked loudly enough to be overheard by Jim's dragon-ears. Otherwise, there was complete silence.

  Jim hesitated. No light at all showed from the windows of the house; and now that he was here, he was feeling a reluctance to awaken the magician.

  As he stood indecisively, a conviction began to creep over him that the building was not merely shut up for the night, but was deserted. In the little clearing, an air of abandonment and emptiness hung on the air itself.

  "So, there he is!" growled a voice.

  Jim spun around.

  "Aragh!" he shouted.

  The wolf was approaching from the shadows at the edge of the clearing. Jim was so glad to see him, he could have hugged him. Behind the lean, gleaming-eyed shape strode a larger, familiar dragon-figure.

  "Smrgol!" said Jim.

  He had not realized until this moment how he had come to feel for these two, and for Brian and the others. It became clear to him that the space between contrasting life forms in this world was not so great as in the world he had left. Life and death were next-door neighbors; similarly, love and hate were as close as two doorways at the end of a corridor, and if you did not learn to hate someone within a short space of time, you learned to love.

  "What are you two doing here?" he asked.

  "Waiting for you," Aragh snarled.

  "Waiting for me? But how did you know I was coming here?"

  "The Mage did," said Smrgol. "He called me here yesterday by a cliff sparrow who brought me his message. "Dragon," he said, when I got here, 'James Eckert, whom you know as Gorbash, and I each have long journeys to make—alone. If I make mine, I'll find you all together, later on. If James makes his, he'll come looking for me, here. Wait for him, and tell him what I just told you. Also, tell him that the hour is close and the battle is greater than I thought. More than one plane is involved—can you say that word, dragon?"

  " 'Plane,' I said. And then: 'What does it mean, Mage?'

  " 'Very good,' he said. 'And never mind what it means. James will understand. More than one plane is involved, and if we can fight together to save the sickness here from spreading out over all, so much the better our chances. But if we can't fight together, still it behooves each of us to fight on as he can, alone; for if our opposition succeeds, there'll be nothing left for any of us . .. Have you got all that, dragon?'

  " I can recite all the legends from the First Dragon on—' I was starting to tell him, but he cut me short.

  " 'And never mind legends either, right now, if you please, Smrgol,' he said. 'Also tell that wolf—'

  " 'Aragh?' I asked. 'Is he coming here, too?'

  " 'Naturally. He'll be wanting to know what's got into James. Now stop interrupting!' he said. 'Tell the wolf to go find the knight, the bowman, the outlaw and his daughter, and tell them all that they're needed for the last battle. Also, there's no use in their going on to Malencontri. Sir Hugh and his men have already turned aside to answer the call of the Dark Powers in the Loathly Tower, whose minions they now are. Even if Sir Brian and the others should take Castle Malencontri now, it'd be worthless to them. For if the Dark Powers win, Sir Hugh will gain it back with one stroke of his sword on its gate and a single crossbow bolt over its walls. Tell them that they'll see me before the Loathly Tower, if I return from my journey. Likewise, they'll see James there if he returns safely from his. And so farewell.' "

  " 'And so farewell'?" Jim echoed. "Was that part of the message?"

  "I don't know. But they were his last words," said Smrgol. "Then he disappeared—you know, the way magicians do."

  "What was your journey, Gorbash?" asked Aragh.

  Jim opened his mouth and closed it again. It would not be easy—or comfortable—to explain to these two about his recent inner pilgrimage into self-examination and self-discovery, which Carolinus by some magical means seemed to have anticipated.

  "Someday, maybe," he said, "I might be able to tell you. But not right now."

  "Oh, one of those journeys," Aragh growled, leaving Jim uncomfortably uncertain as to how much the wolf actually knew or understood. "All right, you're here. Let's get to this Loathly Tower, then, and settle matters!" His teeth clashed together on the last word.

  "Gorbash and I will go," said Smrgol. "You forget, wolf, you've a message to the knight and his company. In fact, you were probably supposed to go right away, when I told you."

  "I'm at nobody's orders," said Aragh. "I wanted to stay to s
ee Gorbash safely back from this journey of his, and I did."

  "You'd better go now," Smrgol insisted.

  "Ha!" snapped Aragh. "I will, then. But, save a couple of those Dark Powers for me, Gorbash. I'll catch up with you."

  The shadows seemed to close about him; and he was gone.

  "Not a bad sort—for a wolf," said Smrgol, glancing back into the darkness, for a second. "Touchy, though. But then, they all are. Now, Gorbash, as soon as it's dawn, we'd better be pressing on to the Tower. So what you'd better do is get some rest after your long journey the Mage talked about—"

  "Rest?" said Jim. "I don't need rest!"

  And in fact, even as the words popped out of his jaws, he realized that they were correct. He felt fine.

  "Perhaps you don't think you need rest, my boy," Smrgol was saying severely. "But a dragon of any experience knows that to be in good fighting trim he needs sleep and food—"

  "Food?" Jim asked, suddenly alerted. "Have you got something to eat?"

  "No," Smrgol replied. "And all the more reason you should plan on getting five or six solid hours of slumber—"

  "I couldn't sleep."

  "Couldn't sleep… ? A dragon who can't sleep? Enough of these wild stories, Gorbash. Any dragon, and particularly one of our family—can always eat, drink or sleep—"

  "Why not take off right away?" Jim asked.

  "Fly at night?"

  "There's a bright moon," Jim said. "You just saw me fly in here."

  "And very reckless it was. Youngsters like you always like to take chances. They get away with something nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand. Then, one day, their luck turns sour and they wish they'd listened. But by then it's too late. What if while you were in the air the sky'd clouded up before you realized it, and suddenly you found you couldn't see the ground?"

  Jim opened his jaws to tell the older dragon what he had discovered about flying in utter darkness and rain, then decided to leave well enough alone.