The Dragon and The George

Then he saw Angie.

  He knew he was too far from the tower to see her as clearly as he now saw her. At this distance, in this light, her face should have been hard to make out. But he saw her both from a distance and as if from close up, with a sharp and perfect clarity. She stood in the slight shadow of a ruined doorway opening on a balcony halfway up the side of the tower. Her blouse stirred to the slow movement of her breath. Her calm blue eyes stared closely into him. Her lips were half parted.

  "Angie!" he cried.

  He had not realized how much he had missed her. He had not understood how much he had wanted her. He took a step forward and found his way blocked by something as unyielding as an iron bar set in posts of concrete. He looked down. It was only the length of the wand, held in the old arm of Carolinus, but it was a barrier beyond his strength to pass.

  "Where?" Carolinus demanded.

  "There! On the balcony of the tower, there! See?" Jim pointed; and the others lifted their heads to peer where he indicated. "In the doorway! Can't you see? Up on the side of the tower, in the doorway!"

  "Not a thing!" said Brian, gruffly, dropping the hand with which he had been shading his eyes.

  "Maybe," said the mere-dragon, doubtfully. "Maybe… back in the shadows, there. I'm not sure, really…"

  "Jim," said Angie.

  "There!" cried Jim. "You hear her?"

  He pushed the restraining staff once again. But it was no use.

  "I can hear you, Angie!" he shouted.

  "You don't have to raise your voice," she answered, softly. "I can hear you, too. Jim, it's all right. It's just all those others that don't belong here. If you come up by yourself and get me, I can leave, and we can go home and everything will be fine."

  "I can't!" cried Jim, almost sobbing, for Carolinus' staff would still not let him pass. "They won't let me go!"

  "They've got no right to keep you, Jim. Ask the Mage what right he has to keep you, and he'll have to let you go. Ask him, and then come up here by yourself to get me."

  Jim turned, raging, on Carolinus.

  "What right—?" he began.

  "STOP!" Carolinus' voice went off like a cannon exploding in Jim's ears.

  It dizzied, deafened and half blinded him, so that vision and hearing were blocked as if by thick, soft barriers. His unnaturally keen vision and hearing of Angie were gone, but he could still make himself think he saw her—as a shadow-in-shadow in the doorway behind a balcony on the tower.

  "Why?" Jim turned on Carolinus in fury.

  The magician did not back off an inch. His dark eyes glittered above his white beard.

  "By the Powers!" he shouted, and his words came very clearly to Jim's ears. "Will you walk blindly into the very first trap They set for you?"

  "What trap?" Jim demanded. "I was just talking to Angie—!"

  The sentence broke off on his lips as Carolinus swung his staff to point. About the base of the tower, between it and the boulders on the slope, had just arisen the wicked head of a dragon as large as Jim himself.

  Smrgol's thunderous bellow split the strangely singing air.

  "Bryagh! Traitor! Thief—inchworm! Come down here!"

  The distant dragon opened his mouth. His booming answer rolled down to them.

  "Tell us about Gormely Keep, old bag of bones!" he thundered. "Ancient mud puppy, fat lizard, scare us with words!"

  "Why, you—" Smrgol lurched forward.

  "Hold!" shouted Carolinus; and Smrgol reared high, checking himself, his heavy foreclaws digging deep into the sandy soil as his body came down.

  "True…" he rumbled, his eyes hot.

  "Old iguana! Go sleep in the sun!" Bryagh taunted.

  But the older dragon now turned away, without answering, to the magician.

  "What's hidden, Mage?" he asked.

  "We'll see."

  Carolinus' voice was tight. He raised his staff and brought it down endwise, three times, on the earth. With each impact the whole causeway seemed to shake.

  Up among the rocks, one particularly large boulder tottered and rolled out of the way. Jim's breath shuddered in his throat and he heard Brian, behind him, grunt hoarsely. Secoh cried out on a thin, sharp note.

  In the space that the dislodged boulder had revealed, a huge, slug-like head lifted from the ground. It raised up even higher as they watched, yellow-brown in the harsh sunlight, its two sets of horns searching as its upper body waved from side to side, revealing a light external shell, a platelet with the merest hint of a spire. Its horns twitched and the eyes on the end of the primary pair aimed themselves at the group below. Slowly, it began to creep down the slope toward them, leaving a glistening trail on boulders and sand behind it.

  "The Worm," said Carolinus, softly.

  "… that can be killed," growled Smrgol, thoughtfully. "Though not easily. Blast it, I wish it were Bryagh alone!"

  "Nor is it those two alone." Carolinus struck at the ground three times again.

  "Come forth!" he cried, his old voice piping high on the quivering air. "By the Powers! Come forth!"

  And then they saw it.

  From behind the great barricade of enormous rocks near the top of the tower hill, there slowly raised a bald and glistening dome of hairless gray skin. Gradually, this revealed two perfectly round blue eyes, below which was exposed no proper nose but, instead, two air slits side by side, as if the whole of the bare, enormous skull was covered with a simple sheet of thick skin. As it rose still farther, this unnatural head—as big around as a beach ball—showed its wide and idiotically grinning mouth, entirely lipless and with two jagged but matching rows of pointed teeth.

  With a clumsy, studied motion, the whole creature rose to its feet and stood among the boulders. It was man-like in shape, but was clearly nothing ever spawned by the human race. A good twelve feet in height it stood, a rough patchwork of untanned hides studded with bones, bits of metal and clusters of tiny color points that could have been gems and made a kilt around its thick waist.

  But this was not the extent of its difference from the race of man. It had, to begin with, no neck at all. Its unnatural hairless, near-featureless head was balanced like an apple atop perfectly square shoulders of gray, coarse-looking skin. Its torso was one straight trunk, from which arms and legs sprouted with disproportionate thickness and roundness, like sections of pipe. Its knees were hidden by its kilt and its lower legs by the rocks; but the elbows of its oversize arms had unnatural hinges to them, while the lower arms were almost as large as the upper and near-wristless, and the hands themselves awkward, thick-fingered parodies of the human extremities, with only three digits, one of which was a single-jointed, opposed thumb.

  The right hand held a club, bound with rusty metal, that surely not even such a monster should have been able to lift. Yet one thick, crook-fingered hand hefted it lightly, as deftly as Carolinus had carried his staff.

  The monster opened its mouth.

  "He!" it went. "He! He!"

  The sound was chilling. It was an incredibly bass titter, if such a thing can be imagined. And though the tone was about that of the low note of a three-valve tuba, it clearly came from the creature's upper throat and head. Nor was there any real humor in it. Having sounded its voice, the monster fell silent, watching the advance of the great slug with its round, light blue eyes.

  Jim found his dragon jaws open, panting like a dog after a long run. Beside him, Smrgol stirred slowly.

  "Yes," he rumbled sadly, almost as if to himself, "what I was afraid of. An ogre."

  In the silence that followed, Sir Brian got down from Blanchard and began to tighten the girths of his saddle.

  "So, so, Blanchard," he crooned, softly. But the large white horse was trembling so violently it could not stand still. Brian shook his head, and his hands fell from the girths. "I must fight on foot, it seems," he said.

  The rest were watching Carolinus. The magician leaned on his staff, looking very old indeed, the lines looking even deeper in the ancient skin of his fa
ce. He had been watching the ogre, but now he turned back to Jim and the other two dragons.

  "I'd hoped all along," he said, "that it needn't come to this. However"—he waved his hand at the approaching worm, the now-silent Bryagh and the watching ogre—"as you see, the world goes never the way we want it, but must be haltered and led."

  He winced, produced his flask and cup, and took a drink of milk. Putting the utensils back again, he turned to Dafydd.

  "Master Bowman," he said, almost formally. "The harpies are again in the tower, but when the others attack they'll be out again. See how the clouds overhead now sag down from the tower's height."

  He pointed upward. It was true: the cloud cover now bellied down like the worn-out ceiling of some ancient room. The thick, eye-baffling vapor hung less than thirty feet above their heads.

  "The harpies will come diving swiftly out of that cover," said the magician, "giving you all but no time whatsoever to shoot before they're on you. Do you think you can hit them with those arrows of yours under such conditions?"

  Dafydd cocked an eye upward.

  "If the clouds come no lower—" he began.

  "They cannot," said Carolinus. "The power of my staff holds them at no closer than this."

  "Then," Dafydd replied, "provided they come no faster than the one I shot a short while ago, I have a fair chance, look you. I do not say that one may not get through, for I am but a man, after all—though there have been those who thought I was something more, with bow and arrow. But it is a fair chance I can put a shaft through each of them before it can do us harm."

  "Good!" said Carolinus. "More than a fair chance, none of us can ask for. Don't forget that their bite is poisonous, however, even when the harpy itself is dead."

  He turned back to Brian.

  "I'd suggest, Sir Brian," he said, "particularly since you're to be on foot, that you take the worm. You'll be most useful that way. I know you'd prefer that renegade dragon, but the worm is the greater danger to the others who have no armor."

  "Difficult to slay, I imagine?" queried the knight, stopping from adjusting the armstrap on the inner face of his shield to squint up the slope at the approaching slug shape.

  "Its vital organs are hidden deep inside it," Carolinus explained, "and, being mindless, it will fight on long after being mortally wounded. Cut off those eye stalks and blind it first, if you can."

  "What—" Jim began, then found his voice hampered by the dry throat. He had to swallow before he could continue. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Why fight the ogre, boy! Fight the ogre!" roared Smrgol; and the inhuman giant up on the slope, hearing him, shifted his round-eyed gaze from the worm to fasten it on the old dragon. "And I'll take on that louse of a Bryagh. The george here'll chop up the worm, the Bowman'll deal with the harpies, the Mage'll hold back the evil influences, the wolf keep off the sandmirks—and that'll be that!"

  Jim opened his mouth to cure Gorbash's grand-uncle of what seemed a bad case of false optimism—then suddenly realized that it was nothing of the kind. Smrgol was deliberately trying to pass the matter off lightly in order to put heart in Jim. This, when the old dragon was himself half dead and certainly no match for the powerful young Bryagh.

  Suddenly Jim felt as if his heart had turned over in his chest. He looked around him at the others. If the old and crippled Smrgol was no match for Bryagh, was Brian any more a match for that obscene worm now only about thirty yards off? Was it a fair match, Aragh on three legs, for all the wolf's indifference to their chittering, against the horde of small sandmirks that remained alive? And Dafydd, miracle archer that he was, how could he hope to shoot down without error harpies that could appear practically on top of him without warning? Finally, was it fair to expect the old magician by himself to hold down all the impalpable evil in this place while the battles were going on?

  Jim himself had a good reason for being here: Angie. But the others were here primarily because of him, involved by him in a fight where the odds would all be against them. Guilt moved deep inside Jim and weakened his legs. He turned to the knight.

  "Brian," he said. "You and the others don't need to do this—"

  "Lord, yes!" replied the knight, busy with his equipment. "Worms, ogres—one fights them when one runs into them, you know."

  He considered his spear and put it aside.

  "No, not as long as I'm to be on foot," he murmured to himself.

  "Smrgol," Jim said, turning to the dragon, "don't you see? Bryagh's a lot younger than you. And you're not well—"

  "Er…" Secoh muttered, hastily, and broke down in what seemed to be embarrassment and confusion.

  "Speak up, boy!" rumbled Smrgol.

  "Well…" stammered the mere-dragon, "it's just—wh-what I mean is, I couldn't bring myself to fight that worm or that ogre. I really couldn't. I just sort of go to pieces when I think of one of them getting close to me. But I could, well, fight another dragon. It wouldn't be quite so bad—not so frightening, I mean—if that dragon up there were to break my neck…"

  He broke down and stammered incoherently.

  "I know I'm sounding silly…"

  "Nonsense! Good lad!" bellowed Smrgol. "Glad to have you! I can't quite get into the air myself at the moment—still a bit stiff. But if you could fly over and work that sea lizard down this way, where I can get a grip on him, we'll stretch him out for the buzzards."

  He dealt the mere-dragon a tremendous thwack with his tail by way of congratulations, almost knocking the other off his feet.

  Jim turned back to Carolinus.

  "There's no retreat," said the magician, before Jim could speak. "This is a game of chess where, if one piece withdraws, all on his side fall. Hold back the creatures, all of you, and I'll hold back the forces; for the creatures will finish me if you go down and the forces finish you if they get me."

  "Now, look here, Gorbash!" Smrgol shouted in Jim's ear. "That worm's almost down here. Let me tell you something about how to fight ogres, based on experience. You listening, boy?"

  "Yes," said Jim, numbly.

  "I know you've heard the other dragons calling me an old windbag when I wasn't around. But I have conquered an ogre—the only one of our race to do it in the last eight hundred years. They haven't. So pay attention, if you want to win your own fight."

  Jim nodded.

  "All right," he said.

  "Now, the first thing to know"—Smrgol glanced at the oncoming worm and lowered his voice confidentially—"is about the bones in an ogre."

  "Never mind the details," said Jim. "What do I do?"

  "In a minute, in a minute…" Smrgol answered. "Don't get excited, boy. An excited dragon is a losing dragon. Now, about the bones in an ogre. The thing to remember is that they're big—matter of fact, in the arms and legs they're mainly bone. So there's no use trying to bite clear through. What you want to do is get the muscle—that's tough enough, as it is—and hamstring. That's point one."

  He paused to look significantly at Jim. Jim managed with an effort to keep his mouth shut and be patient.

  "Now, point two," Smrgol went on. "Also connected with bones. Notice the elbows on that ogre. They aren't like a george's elbows. They're what you might call double-jointed. Why? Simply because, with the big bones they've got to have and the muscle on them, they'd never be able to bend a bone more than halfway up before the bottom part'd bump the top, if they had a george-type joint. Now, the point of all this is that when that ogre swings his club, he can only swing it in one way with that elbow. That's up and down. If he wants to swing it side to side, he's got to use his shoulder. Consequently, if you can catch him with his club down and to one side of his body, you've got an advantage; it takes him two moves to get it back up and in line again—instead of one, like a george does."

  "Yes, yes…" said Jim, watching the advance of the worm.

  "Don't get impatient, boy! Keep cool! Now, his knees don't have that double joint, so if you can knock him off his feet you've got a real advant
age. But don't try that unless you're sure you can do it; because once he gets his arms around you, you're a goner. The only way to fight him is in and out—fast. Wait for his swing, dodge it, dive in while his arm is down, tear him up, get back out again. Got it?"

  "Got it," said Jim, numbly.

  "Good! Whatever you do, remember, don't let him get his grip on you. And don't pay any attention to what's happening to the rest of us, no matter what you think you hear or see out of the corner of your eyes. It's everyone for himself, once things start. Concentrate on your own foe. And, boy…"

  "Yes?" Jim answered.

  "Keep your head!" The old dragon's voice was almost pleading. "Whatever you do, don't let your dragon-instinct get in there and run away with you. That's why the georges have been winning against us all these years, the way they have. Just remember you're faster than that ogre and that your brain'll win for you if you stay clear, keep your head and don't rush. I tell you, boy—"

  He was interrupted by a sudden cry of joy from Brian, who had been rummaging around in the panniers behind Blanchard's saddle.

  "I say," shouted Brian, running up to Jim with surprising lightness and agility, considering the weight of his armor. "The most marvelous stroke of luck! Look what I just found!"

  He waved a wispy length of white cloth at Jim.

  "What?" Jim demanded, his heart leaping.

  "Geronde's favor! And just in time, too. Be a good fellow, will you," Brian went on, turning to Carolinus, "and tie it about my vambrace, here on the shield arm… Thank you, Mage."

  Carolinus looked grim, but nonetheless tucked his wand into the crook of one arm and with his freed hands fastened the cloth around the armor of Brian's left forearm. Brian turned about, drove his spear into the ground and tethered Blanchard's bridle to it. Then, catching up his shield position, he turned back and drew his sword with his other hand. The bright blade gleamed even in the dull light. He leaned forward to throw the weight of his armor before him; and ran at the worm, which was now hardly more than a dozen feet away.

  "A Neville-Smythe! A Neville-Smythe! Geronde!" he shouted as they came together.

  Jim heard but did not witness the impact of their collision. For just then everything began to happen at once. Up on the hill, Bryagh screamed suddenly in fury and launched himself down the slope and into the air, wings spread like some great bomber gliding in for a crash landing. Behind Jim was the frenzied flapping of leathery wings as Secoh took to the air to meet him—but this was drowned by a sudden, short, deep-chested and grunting cry, like a wordless shout. Lifting his club, the ogre had stepped clear of the boulders, coming straight down the hill with heavy, ground-covering strides.