Jim was brought up short in his thoughts at this point by the sudden remembrance of what he was. He had, he realized, been thinking like a human, not like a dragon. What, in its right mind, would want to creep up on a dragon? Outside of a knight in armor. And what would a knight in armor be doing prowling around in the dark? Or another dragon, for that matter? The only other dragon he had any reason to fear around here, if Smrgol's report on the mere-dragons had been correct, was Bryagh; and Bryagh would be making a mistake if he came anywhere near, in the mood possessing Jim right now.
In fact, thought Jim, he would like nothing better than to get his jaws and claws on Bryagh right now. He felt a grim and sullen anger begin to kindle in him like a hot coal fanned to life just beneath his breastbone. The feeling was rather enjoyable. He let it kindle and grow until it suddenly occurred to him that it was a dragonly, rather than a human, anger he was feeling. Perhaps this was what Smrgol had been talking about when he had advised Gorbash not to let his dragon-fury run away with him.
Jim made a determined effort to put the emotion aside, but the inward fire he had kindled did not seem disposed to go out that easily. He struggled with it, alarmed now, and—as luck would have it—just at that moment he caught sight of another dragon shape, down on one of the spits of land directly in front of him.
The other dragon was concerned with something lying in the grass. What it was, Jim could not make out from this height and angle; but in any case, its identity was academic. The sight of the other dragon had been all that was needed to bring to full flame the fury now within him.
"Bryagh!" The word snarled, unbidden in his throat.
Reflexively, he nosed over and went into a dive like a fighter plane, his sights locked on the target below.
It was a dive sudden enough to take the dragon underneath utterly by surprise. Unfortunately, it had one natural drawback. Even a small flivver airplane with its motor cut off makes a noticeable amount of noise descending in a steep dive; and a large dragon such as Gorbash had no less air resistance than the average two-seater light airplane. Moreover, the dragon below had evidently had some experience with such a noise; for without looking upward he made one frantic leap and went tumbling head over tail out of the way as Jim slammed down onto the ground at the spot where a second before the other had been.
The attacked dragon came to the end of his tumbling, sat up, took a look at Jim and began to wail.
"It's not fair! It's not fair!" he cried in a—for a dragon—remarkably high-pitched voice. "Just because you're bigger than I am! And I had to fight two hours for it. It almost got away half a dozen times. Besides, it's the first good-sized one to wander out onto the fens in months, and now you're going to take it away from me. And you don't need it, not at all. You're big and fat, and I'm weak and hungry…"
Jim blinked and stared. He glanced from the dragon down to the thing in the grass before him and saw that it was the carcass of a rather old and stringy-looking cow, badly bitten up and with a broken neck. Looking back at the other dragon again, he realized for the first time that the other was little better than half his own size, and so emaciated that he appeared on the verge of collapse from starvation.
"… Just my luck!" the other dragon was whimpering. "Every time I get something good, someone comes along and takes it away from me. All I ever get is fish—"
"Hold on!" said Jim.
"—Fish, fish, fish! Cold fish, without any warm blood in them to put strength in my bones—"
"Hold on, I say! SHUT UP!" Jim bellowed, in Gorbash's best voice.
The other dragon stopped his complaining as abruptly as if he was a record player whose plug had been pulled.
"Yes, sir," he said, timidly.
"What're you talking about?" demanded Jim. "I'm not going to take your cow away from you."
"Oh no, sir," said the other dragon; and tittered as if to show that nobody could accuse him of not knowing a good joke when he heard it.
"I'm not."
"He-he-he!" chuckled the smaller dragon. "You certainly are a card, your honor."
"Dammit, I'm serious!" snapped Jim, backing away from the carcass. "Go ahead, eat! I just thought you were someone else."
"Oh, I don't want it. Really, I don't! I was just joking about being starved. Really, I was!"
"Look," said Jim, taking a tight rein on his dragon-temper, which was beginning to rekindle, "what's your name?"
"Oh, well," said the other. "Oh, well—you know—"
"WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"
"Secoh, your worship!" yelped the dragon, fearfully. "Just Secoh, that's all. I'm nobody important, your highness. Just a little, unimportant mere-dragon."
"You don't have to swear it to me," said Jim. "I believe you. All right, Secoh"—he waved at the dead cow—"dig in. I don't want any myself, but maybe you can give me some directions and information about this territory and what lives here."
"Well…" Secoh hedged. He had been sidling forward in fawning fashion while the conversation was going on, until he was once more almost next to the cow. "If you'll excuse my table manners, sir. I'm just a mere-dragon—" And he tore into the meat before him in sudden, ravenous fashion.
Jim watched. His first impulse was the compassionate one of letting the other get some food inside him before making him talk. But, as he sat and observed, Jim began to feel the stirrings of a not inconsiderable hunger himself. His belly rumbled, suddenly and audibly. He stared at the torn carcass of the cow and tried to tell himself it was not the sort of thing any civilized person would want to eat. Raw meat—off a dead animal—flesh, bones, hide and all…
"Say," said Jim, drawing closer to Secoh and the cow, and clearing his throat, "that does look rather good, after all."
His stomach rumbled again. Apparently his dragon-body had none of his human scruples about the eat-ability of what he was looking at.
"Secoh?"
Secoh reluctantly lifted his head from the cow and rolled his eyes warily to Jim, although he continued to chew and gulp frantically.
"Er, Secoh—I'm a stranger around these parts," said Jim. "I suppose you know your way around pretty well. I—Say, how does that cow taste?"
"Oh, terrible—Mumpf—" said Secoh with his mouth full. "Stringy, old—awful, really. Good enough for a mere-dragon like me, but not for—"
"Well, about those directions I wanted…"
"Yes, your worship?"
"I think—Oh, well, it's your cow."
"That's what your honor promised," replied Secoh, cautiously.
"But you know, I wonder," Jim grinned confidingly at him, "I just wonder how a cow like that would taste. You know I've never tasted anything quite like that before?"
"No, sir." A large tear welled up in Secoh's near eye and splashed down upon the grass.
"I actually haven't. I wonder—it's up to you, now—would you mind if I just tasted it?"
Another large tear rolled down Secoh's cheek.
"If—if your honor wishes," he choked. "Won't you—won't you help yourself, please?"
"Well, thanks," said Jim.
He walked up and sank his teeth experimentally into a shoulder of the carcass. The rich juices of the warm meat trickled over his tongue. He tore the shoulder loose…
Some little time later, he and Secoh sat back, polishing bones with the rough upper surfaces of their forked tongues, which were abrasive as the coarsest sandpaper.
"Did you get enough to eat, Secoh?" Jim asked.
"More than enough, sir," replied the mere-dragon, staring at the denuded skeleton with a wild and famished eye. "Although if you don't mind, your honor, I've got a weakness for marrow—"
He picked up a thighbone and began to crunch it like a stick of candy.
"Tomorrow we'll hunt up another cow and I'll kill it for you," said Jim. "You can have it all to yourself."
"Oh, thank you, your honor," said Secoh, with polite lack of conviction.
"I mean it—now, about this Loathly Tower, where is it?"
"The wh-what?" stammered Secoh.
"The Loathly Tower. The Loathly Tower! You know where it is, don't you?"
"Oh yes, sir. But your honor wouldn't want to go there, would your worship? Not that I'm presuming to give your lordship advice—" Secoh cried suddenly, in a high and terrified voice.
"No, no. Go on," said Jim.
"—but of course I'm only a little, timid mere-dragon, your honor. Not like you. But the Loathly Tower, it's a terrible place, your highness."
"How terrible?"
"Well… it just is." Secoh cast an unhappy look about him. "It's what spoiled all of us, you know, five hundred years ago. We used to be just like you other dragons—Oh, not so big and fierce as you, of course, sir. But then, after that, they say the Dark Powers got pushed back again and sealed up, and the tower itself broken and ruined—not that it helped us mere-dragons any. Everybody else just went home and left us the way we'd become. So, it's supposed to be all right, now. But all the same I wouldn't go near there if I was your worthiness, I really wouldn't."
"But what's there that's so bad?" demanded Jim. "What sort of thing, specifically, is it?"
"Well, I wouldn't say there was any thing there," replied Secoh, cautiously. "It's nothing your worship could exactly put a claw on. It's just that whatever or whoever goes near it—without belonging to it, I mean—it does something to them, sir. Of course, it's the evil sorts that head for it in the first place. But sometimes things just as strange seem to come from it, and lately—"
Secoh caught himself and became very busy searching among the bones of the cow.
"Lately, what?"
"Nothing—really, nothing, your excellency!" cried Secoh, a little shrilly, starting up. "Your illustriousness shouldn't catch a worthless little mere-dragon up like that. We're not too bright, you know. I only meant… lately the tower's been a more fearful place than ever. No one knows why. And we all keep well away from it!"
"Probably just your imagination," said Jim, shortly.
He had always been a skeptic by nature; and although this strange world was clearly full of all sorts of variances with the normal pattern of things as he knew them, his mind instinctively revolted against too much credit in the supernatural—particularly, he thought, the old B-movie horror type of supernatural.
"We know what we know," said the mere-dragon with unusual stubbornness. He stretched out a scrawny and withered forelimb. "Is that imagination?"
Jim grunted. The meal he had just gulped down had made him drowsy. The gray last light of day was leaden in its effect upon his nerves. He felt torpid and dull.
"I think I'll grab some sleep," he said. "Anyway, how do I find the Loathly Tower from here?"
"Just go due west. You won't be able to miss it."
A shiver was to be heard in the last words of the mere-dragon, but Jim was becoming too sleepy to care. Dimly, he heard the rest of what Secoh was telling him.
"It's out along the Great Causeway. That's a wide lane of solid land running due east and west through the fens for about five miles, right to the sea. You just follow it until you come to the tower. It stands on a rise of rock overlooking the edge of the ocean."
"Five miles…" Jim muttered.
He would have to wait until morning, which was not an unpleasant prospect. His armored body seemed undisturbed by the evening temperature, whatever it was, and the grassy ground beneath him was soft.
"Yes, I think I'll get some sleep," he murmured. He settled down on the grass and yielded to an impulse of his dragon-body to curl his long neck back and tuck his head bird-fashion under one wing. "See you in the morning, Secoh."
"Whatever your excellency desires," replied the mere-dragon in his timid voice. "I'll just settle down over here, and if your worship wants me, your worship has only to call and I'll be right here…"
The words faded out on Jim's ear as he dropped into sleep like an overladen ship foundering in deep saltwater.
Chapter Seven
When he opened his eyes, the sun was well above the horizon. The bright, transparent, cool light of early morning lit up the clear blue arch of sky overhead. The seagrass and the club rushes swayed slightly in the early breeze that was sending a series of light ripples over the stretch of shallow lake near where Jim lay. He sat up, yawned expansively and blinked.
Secoh was gone. So were the leftover bones.
For a second Jim felt a twinge of annoyance. He had been unconsciously counting on tapping the mere-dragon for more information about the fens. But then the annoyance faded into amusement. The picture of Secoh stealthily collecting the denuded bones in careful silence and sneaking away before daybreak tickled Jim's sense of humor.
He walked down to the edge of the lake and drank, lapping like some enormous cat and flipping several pints of water into his throat with each flick of his long tongue. Satisfied at last, he looked westward toward the misty line of the ocean and spread his wings—
"Ouch!" he said.
Hastily he folded the wings again, cursing himself mentally. He should, of course, have expected this from the way Smrgol had run out of breath while flying yesterday. The first attempt to stretch Gorbash's wings had sent what felt like several keen-edged knives stabbing into muscles he had seldom used before. Like anyone else who has suddenly overexercised a body out of shape for such activity, he was stiff as a board in that portion of his body he had most need of at the moment.
The irony of it did not escape him. For twenty-six years he had gotten along quite nicely without wings. Now, after one day's use of them, he was decidedly miffed to have to proceed on foot. His amusement gone, he turned his head toward the ocean and set about following a land route.
Unfortunately, it could not be a direct route. Instinctively, he tried to travel on land as much as possible, but often he had to jump small ditches—which caused his wings to spread instinctively and sent fresh stabs of pain into his stiff flying muscles—and once or twice he had to actually swim a ditch or small lake too wide to jump. This taught him why dragons preferred to walk or fly. Unlike humans, they apparently had a slightly higher specific gravity than water. In other words, unless he swam furiously, he had a tendency to sink. And his dragon-body, Jim found, had a near-hysterical fear of getting any water up its nose.
However, proceeding by these methods, he finally gained a rather wide tongue of land which he assumed to be the Great Causeway that Secoh had spoken about. He had seen nothing else to compare with it in the fens and, if further proof were needed, it seemed to run westward as far as he could see, as straight as a Roman road. It could almost, in fact, have been built there: it was several feet higher than most of the surrounding bits of land, covered with bushes and even an occasional tree.
Jim rolled on the grass—he had just finished swimming one of the stretches of water too wide to jump—and flopped, belly-down, in the sun. A tree nearby kept the sun out of his eyes, the heat of the daystar's rays were soothing to his stiff muscles and the grass was soft. He had walked and swum away most of the morning and the midday hush was relaxing. He felt comfortable. Dropping his head on his foreclaws, he dozed a bit…
He was awakened by the sound of someone singing. Lifting his head, he looked about. Someone was coming out along the causeway. Jim could now hear the dry clopping of a horse's hooves on the firm earth, the jingle of metal, the creak of leather, and over all this a fine, baritone voice caroling cheerfully to itself. Whatever the earlier verses of the song had been, Jim had no idea. But the chorus he heard now came clearly to his ear.
"… A right good spear,
a constant mind—
A trusty sword and true!
The dragons of the mere shall find
What Neville-Smythe can do!"
The tune was one of the sort that Jim may have heard somewhere before. He was still trying to decide if he really knew it or not, when there was a crackling of branches. A screen of bushes some twenty feet away parted to disgorge a man in full plate armor, with
his visor up and a single strip of scarlet pennon afloat just below the head of his upright lance; he was seated on a large, somewhat clumsy-looking white horse.
Jim, interested, sat up for a better look.
It was, as things turned out, not the best possible move. Immediately, the man on horseback saw him and the visor came down with a clang, the long lance seemed to leap into one steel-gauntleted hand, there came a flash of golden spurs, and the white horse broke into a heavy-hooved gallop, directly for Jim.
"A Neville-Smythe! A Neville-Smythe!" roared the man, muffledly, within his helmet.
Jim's reflexes took over. He went straight up into the air, stiff wing muscles forgotten, and was just about to hurl himself forward and down on the approaching figure when a cold finger of sanity touched his mind for a fraction of a second and he flung himself instead into the upper branches of the tree that had shaded his eyes.
The knight—as Jim took him to be—pulled his horse to a skidding stop on its haunches directly under the tree; and looked up through the branches at Jim. Jim looked back down. The tree had seemed fairly good-sized when he was under it. Now that he was up in it, with all his dragon-weight, its branches creaked alarmingly under him and he was not as far above his attacker's head as he would have preferred to be.
The knight tilted back his visor and canted his head back in order to see upward. In the shadow of the helm Jim made out a square-boned, rather lean face with burning blue eyes over a large, hooked nose. The chin was jutting and generous.
"Come down," said the knight.
"No thanks," replied Jim, holding firmly to the tree trunk with tail and claws.
A slight pause followed in the conversation as they both digested the situation.
"Damned catiff mere-dragon!" said the knight, finally.
"I'm not a mere-dragon."
"Don't talk bloody nonsense!"
"I'm not."