Dragonsbane (17 page)

Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold his peace. From the other end of the square, another religious procession made its appearance, one of the southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rabbits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink chintz. The priests of Kantirith seemed to huddle a little more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a disapproving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult; Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful orthodoxy.

But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all any of the crowd around them cared, they might have been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.

“It was a hunting accident,” he explained. “Father and I both hunt, although Father hasn’t done so lately. Mother hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn’t really joking. He can’t stand cowards. She’d follow him over terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up with the hunt; after it was over, he’d hug her and laugh and ask her if it wasn’t worth it that she’d plucked up her courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting to learn to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up because she was so frightened.”

“She sounds like a brave lady,” Jenny said quietly.

Gareth’s glance flicked up to her face, then away again. “It wasn’t really Father’s fault,” he went on after a moment. “But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The horse came down with her over some rocks—in a sidesaddle you can’t fall clear. She died four or five days later. That was five years ago. I—” He hesitated, the words sticking in his throat. “I wasn’t very good to him about it.”

He adjusted his specs in an awkward and unconvincing cover for wiping his eyes on his sleeve ruffle. “Now that I look back on it, I think, if she’d been braver, she’d probably have had the courage to tell him she didn’t want to go—the courage to risk his mockery. Maybe that’s where I get it,” he added, with the shy flash of a grin. “Maybe I should have seen that I couldn’t possibly blame him as much as he blamed himself—that I didn’t say anything to him that he hadn’t already thought.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I understand now. But when I was thirteen, I didn’t. And by the time I did understand, it had been too long to say anything to him. And by that time, there was Zyerne.”

The priests of Kantirith wound their way out of sight up a crooked lane between the drunken lean of crazy buildings. Children who had stopped to gawk after the procession took up their games once more; John resumed his cautious way across the moss-edged, herringbone pattern of the wet cobbles toward them, stopping every few paces to stare at some new marvel—a chair-mender pursuing his trade on the curbstone, or the actors within a cheap theater gesticulating wildly while a crier outside shouted tidbits of the plot to the passersby around the door. He would never, Jenny reflected with rueful amusement, learn to comport himself like the hero of legend that he was.

“It must have been hard for you,” she said.

Gareth sighed. “It was easier a few years ago,” he admitted. “I could hate her cleanly then. Later, for a while I—I couldn’t even do that.” He blushed again. “And now...”

A commotion in the square flared suddenly, like the noise of a dogfight; a woman’s jeering voice yelled, “Whore!” and Jenny’s head snapped around.

But it was not she and her lack of veils that was the target. A little gnome woman, her soft mane of hair like an apricot cloud in the wan sunlight, was making her hesitant way toward the fountain. Her black silk trousers were hitched up over her knees to keep them out of the puddles in the broken pavement, and her white tunic, with its flowing embroideries and carefully mended sleeves, proclaimed that she was living in poverty alien to her upbringing. She paused, peering around her with a painful squint in the too-bright daylight; then her steps resumed in the direction of the fountain, her tiny, round hands clutching nervously at the handle of the bucket that she inexpertly bore.

Somebody else shouted, “Come slumming, have we, m’lady? Tired of sitting up there on all that grain you got hid? Too cheap to hire servants?”

The woman stopped again, swinging her head from side to side as if seeking her tormentors, half-blind in the outdoor glare. Someone caught her with a dog turd on the arm. She hopped, startled, and her narrow feet in their soft leather shoes skidded on the wet, uneven stones. She dropped the bucket as she fell, and groped about for it on hands and knees. One of the women by the fountain, with the grinning approbation of her neighbors, sprang down to kick it beyond her reach.

“That’ll learn you to hoard the bread you’ve bought out of honest folks’ mouths!”

The gnome made a hasty scrabble around her. A faded, fat woman who’d been holding forth the loudest in the gossip around the fountain kicked the pail a little further from the searching hands.

“And to plot against the King!”

The gnome woman raised herself to her knees, peering about her, and one of the children darted out of the gathering crowd behind her and pulled the long wisps of her hair. She spun around, clutching, but the boy had gone. Another took up the game and sprang nimbly out to do the same, too engrossed in the prospect of fun to notice John.

At the first sign of trouble, the Dragonsbane had turned to the man next to him, a blue-tattooed easterner in a metalsmith’s leather apron and not much else, and handed him the three waffles he held stacked in his hands. “Would you ever hold these?” Then he made his way unhurriedly through the press, with a courteous string of “Excuse me... pardon...” in time to catch the second boy who’d jumped out to take up the baiting where the first had begun it.

Gareth could have told them what to expect—Zyerne’s courtiers weren’t the only ones deceived by John’s appearance of harmless friendliness. The bully, caught completely offguard from behind, didn’t even have time to shriek before he hit the waters of the fountain. A huge splash doused every woman on the steps and most of the surrounding idlers. As the boy surfaced, spitting and gasping, Aversin turned from picking up the bucket and said in a friendly tone, “Your manners are as filthy as your clothes—I’m surprised your mother lets you out like that. They’ll be a bit cleaner now, won’t they?”

He dipped the bucket full and turned back to the man who was holding his waffles. For an instant Jenny thought the smith would throw them into the fountain, but John only smiled at him, bright as the sun on a knifeblade, and sullenly the man put the waffles into his free hand. In the back of the crowd a woman sneered, “Gnome lover!”

“Thanks.” John smiled, still at his brass-faced friendliest. “Sorry I threw offal in the fountain and all.” Balancing the waffles in his hand, he descended the few steps and walked beside the little gnome woman across the square toward the mouth of the alley whence she had come. Jenny, hurrying after him with Gareth at her heels, noticed that none followed them too closely.

“John, you are incorrigible,” she said severely. “Are you all right?” This last was addressed to the gnome, who was hastening along on her short, bowed legs, clinging to the Dragonsbane’s shadow for protection.

She peered up at Jenny with feeble, colorless eyes. “Oh, yes. My thanks. I had never—always we went out to the fountain at night, or sent the girl who worked for us, if we needed water during the day. Only she left.” The wide mouth pinched up on the words, at the taste of some unpleasant memory.

“I bet she did, if she was like that lot,” John remarked, jerking his thumb back toward the square. Behind them, the crowd trailed menacingly, yelling, “Traitors! Hoarders! Ingrates!” and fouler things besides. Somebody threw a fish head that flicked off Jenny’s skirts and shouted something about an old whore and her two pretty-boys; Jenny felt the bristles of rage rise along her spine. Others took up this theme. She felt angry enough to curse them, but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater curse upon them than to be what they already were.

“Have a waffle?” John offered disarmingly, and the gnome lady took the proffered confection with hands that shook.

Gareth, carmine with embarrassment, said nothing.

Around a mouthful of sugar, John said, “Gie lucky for us fruit and veggies are a bit too dear these days to fling, isn’t it? Here?”

The gnome ducked her head quickly as she entered the shadows of a doorway to a huge, crumbling house wedged between two five-storey tenements, its rear wall dropping straight to the dank brown waters of a stagnant canal. The windows were tightly shuttered, and the crumbling stucco was written over with illiterate and filthy scrawls, splattered with mud and dung. From every shutter Jenny could sense small, weak eyes peering down in apprehension.

The door was opened from within, the gnome taking her bucket and popping through like a frightened mole into its hill. John put a quick hand on the rotting panels to keep them from being shut in his face, then braced with all his strength. The doorkeeper was determined and had the prodigious muscles of the gnomes.

“Wait!” John pleaded, as his feet skidded on the wet marble of the step. “Listen! I need your help! My name’s John Aversin—I’ve come from the north to see about this dragon of yours, but I can’t do it without your aid.” He wedged his shoulder into the narrow slit that was all that was left. “Please.”

The pressure on the other side of the door was released so suddenly that he staggered inward under his own momentum. From the darkness beyond a soft, high voice like a child’s said in the archaic High Speech that the gnomes used at Court, “Come in, thou others. It does thee no good to be thus seen at the door of the house of the gnomes.”

As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard’s sight, saw at once that the gnome who had admitted them was old Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.

Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed, upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tenements of the neighborhood had later been erected. In places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gracious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heating fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosaics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery. It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these intruders from the hostile world of men.

In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, “Thy name is not unknown among us, John Aversin.”

“Well, that makes it easier,” John admitted, dusting off his hands and looking down at the round head of the gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes under the flowing mane of snowy hair. “Be a bit awkward if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could sing you the ballads.”

A slight smile tugged at the gnome’s mouth—the first, Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incongruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the legends. “Thou art the first,” he remarked, ushering them into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk robes whispering as he moved. “How many hast thy father sent out, Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they might know of the dragon’s coming—we, who saw it best.”

Gareth looked disconcerted. “Er—that is—the wrath of the King...”

“And whose fault was that, Heir of Uriens, when rumor had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?”

There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth reddened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his head and said in a stifled voice, “I am sorry, Dromar. I never thought of—of what might be said, or who would take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn’t know. I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the way around.”

The old gnome sniffed. “So.” He folded his small hands before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded, and said, “Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let it go undone, Gareth of Magloshaldon. Another time thou shalt do better.” He turned away, gesturing toward the inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on the floor in the fashion of the gnomes. “Come. Sit. What is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming of the dragon to the Deep?”

“The size of the thing,” John said promptly, as they all settled on their knees around the table. “I’ve only heard rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete measurement?”

From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome woman piped, “The top of his haunch lies level with the frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the doorway arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the measurements of men.”

There was a moment’s silence, as Jenny digested the meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, “If the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty feet.”

“Aye,” Dromar said. “The Market Hall—the first cavern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length.”