Dragonslayer: A Novel (15 page)

"A bit extravagant, isn't it?" Malkin asked, heaving on the painter to steady the boat in the swell.

"You know what these hillmen are like," Greil said, coming to his aid. "All emotion."

"Well, it's my country, dragon or not!" Xenophobius exclaimed, glowering at Galen. "And I'm not leaving it any more! No more fool's errands!"

So they returned, and so Galen had his first sight of Urland. The storm passed as they turned inland, but the sky remained overcast and mists drifted through the drenched countryside. In two hours they came to a juncture in the road, a juncture presided over by a strange, ancient piece of Celtic statuary, so chalky and eroded that Galen could not tell whether it was a bird or a bat. Here they turned left. "Morgenthorme that way," Valerian said. "Swanscombe this way. Not much farther now. We should be there for supper." But Galen noticed that the pace had begun to quicken despite everyone's fatigue, and he at first attributed this fact to the nearness of home; then he saw that the Urlanders had gathered into small bunches and were whispering among themselves and that they had begun to descend into a region of, at first, sparse vegetation, and then, very soon, of no vegetation at all.

"What
is
this place?" he asked and then had to ask again, for Valerian appeared not to have heard him.

"It's the Blight," she said. "It's where . . . well, it's the lair of the dragon." Involuntarily she glanced up at the mist-shrouded hillside. "There's nothing to worry about; that is, not right now. We just have to keep moving. Come on!"

"Where?" Galen had stopped and was squinting up. The mists cleared briefly. "There? Is that it? That cave?"

Valerian nodded. She was walking backward and, although she also had glanced up quickly at the foreboding opening, she was looking now at Galen and gesturing urgently. "Come on. There's no point staying here. Really. I know you want to see . . . it, but it won't be there. It'll be asleep. It always sleeps after, . . . Galen, come on!"

But he was beyond hearing her. He had jogged off the path and begun to climb the hillside, slipping and stumbling in the loose scree, toward the cave's opening, half a league distant. Valerian was shouting after him: "Don't be a fool! You haven't seen what it can do!" He kept going. She stamped her foot, shook her fists, and called to the retreating Urlanders, whose pace had quickened even more: "Henery? Malkin?" They too were beyond hearing. She was alone on the road. She hesitated only a moment, stamping -in fear and exasperation, and then she began to scramble after Galen.

Very quickly Galen learned what the dragon could do. The first evidence lay in the larger boulders, most of them split and ominously flattened on the side facing the cave, eroded or melted by unearthly heat. And then, a few rods farther, there was even more grisly evidence—bits of bone protruding here and there from among the crevasses. He was contemplating these when Valerian caught up with him. "Those are human," he said.

"Of
course
they're human! What do you think . . . we've been trying to tell you . . . this is where ... the sacrifices are made!" She was bending over, laboring for breath after the uphill sprint. Like Galen's, her eyes were watering from the stench of dragon.

"There's a thigh bone, shoulder bone ..."

"Galen, let's get out of here! Please!" But he had started up the slope again, undeterred by the smoldering bits of wood, charred bits of an oaken axle, and by two grotesquely twisted wheel-rims lying beside it. Valerian, however, now saw these for the first time and recognized them. "The tumbril cart!" And she recognized also, although she refused at first to believe the evidence of her eyes, the ring lying on a fiat-topped rock close to the charred axle. She sank slowly to her knees and reached out for it. "Melissa," she said.

The ring was unmistakable. The mate was on her own finger, and she recalled, in a rush that brought tears, all the times of the ring. She remembered Melissa taking Valerian's hand in her own the first day the ring had been there, and saying very softly that it was almost too beautiful to wear; and Simon, Valerian's father, smiling in that way he had that was both pleasure and sadness, and the next week giving Valerian a second ring for her friend, identical, and Melissa crying when Valerian gave it to her on the equinox eve of their first Lottery and saying that it was for luck . . .

Melissa . . .

Valerian went no farther. Holding Melissa's ring, she watched dumbly as Galen toiled the last few feet to the dragon's lair. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that the world was mad and incapable of producing any curative sanity, and that Galen labored doggedly toward his death, as did everyone, and that there was nothing whatever that could be done to stop him.

Far below, from the greensward at the western edge of the Blight, Greil, Malkin, and others had paused. They had missed Valerian and Galen in the Blight, but had been too frightened to go back; there had been no volunteers. Now they watched while Galen, a tiny insect, climbed the last slope to the cave's mouth. They knew well what became of young adventurers who went too close to the earth of Vermithrax; sometimes they came back with dragon scales and sometimes they did not come back at all. They knew also that Vermithrax would probably not emerge so soon after the feast of the equinox, unless direly provoked, and they wondered, curious and watching, whether this young would-be hero, maybe sorcerer, intended to enter the dragon's cave in pursuit of it.

Galen had no such intention. But then, he had no real
intention
of climbing where he did in the first place. What had drawn him was no concise thought but rather an urge, a profound urge which seemed to center in the middle of his chest, right under the amulet. Indeed, twice as he climbed he touched his chest to ensure that the treasure was safe, and both times he felt—he was sure that this was so, despite his sweat and the ardor of his curiosity—the emanation of unusual heat.

He slipped and fell several times. When he looked at his hands he found that they and the rocks were coated with a gelatinous slime, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the declining sun, and that it was from this substance that arose the evil dragon odor. The stench had grown stronger as he came closer to the cave. Scattered amidst the scree were dozens of belly-scales and, although Galen had no way of knowing this, unfamiliar as he was with the physiology of dragons, it was from the holes left by the sacles that the slimy substance issued and would continue to issue until the torn places crusted over. The suppurations left a gleaming trail down through the caverns into the bowels of the earth. With the substance ebbed Vermithrax's life, for although it was not blood, it nevertheless transported energies through that wracked frame, and the semicomatose state into which the dragon had sunk when it had returned to the depths and the lake of fire was in part a sleep of enervation.

Galen knew none of this. He knew only that the vomit odor as he approached the mouth of the cave became overpowering, and that he had involuntarily clenched his sleeve across his mouth and nostrils. He was distantly aware that Valerian had dropped behind and that the other travelers had also paused—but far below—and were watching the last stages of his climb. Only Gringe, a clucking, disapproving presence, had stayed with him.

The last few yards up to the ledge were the most difficult, for not only was the incline precipitous, but any possible footholds were made treacherous by loose and slippery rock. It was clear that no one had made this climb for many, many years. Slowly and cautiously, by scraping away the scree as he proceeded and finding small supporting ledges for his fingers and toes, Galen ascended at last to the ledge at the cave's very mouth. Unlike the area below, this ledge was brushed clean of dirt and pebbles, polished by the scuffling of leathery wings and scaled belly, and it sloped gently down into the mouth of the cave. Panting after his climb, Galen for a moment was seized with vertigo, with a panicky fear that if he did not grasp the granite wall and shut his eyes, he would plummet into either the void behind him or the pit in front. In a moment, however, he had steadied himself, and when he opened his eyes he found that he was staring into a cavern which to his surprise was not completely dark; although he could not see how the light entered, there was, glimmering through other apertures in the porous rock, enough of it for him to see some distance down the abysmal corridor, past the spiky protuberances that stuck out like growths on a monster's gullet, to the place where the corridor turned. Yet, even at that point, it seemed to Galen that the eerie light did not diminish, although it subtly changed its nature, becoming warmer, and flickering. . . .

Nor was the tunnel silent. Once, as a child, Galen had wandered farther south from Cragganmore than he had ever gone, entranced by the magic of that time of spring when the songs of the blackbirds are richest among the marshes and when a green haze of swelling buds hangs in the forests. Enticed by this day, he had wandered away from both Cragganmore and the village and soon found himself deep among the hills, walking on ancient paths. He was neither lost nor frightened; rather, he was curious about one particular path that was so little used that it was almost completely overgrown. Pushing on, he soon arrived at what appeared to be a shallow depression among the hills, a place, perhaps, where a prehistoric river had eddied behind an ice dam ten thousand years before. In fact, this may have been what at first caused the depression, but as Galen drew close, he saw that its grassy slopes had been carved into rudimentary earthen seats, and that the center of the bowl had been slightly raised. Not until he had entered the circle and stood on this earthen podium did he understand that he had entered a theatre, a theatre so old that no one in the village any longer knew or cared what it had been. But Galen knew, for Ulrich had described to him how three hundred years before, the Romans had built such places, and how on summer afternoons people had gathered in them and conspired to create another world, a world in which they dwelt for a little time, and from which they emerged larger in all ways, more heroic, more forgiving, more human.

A theatre! The boy had turned in awe, gazing up at seats that filled slowly with ghosts, now laughing, now listening with rapt attention, now weeping. As he turned, he grew aware of a whispering which was not the breeze, for no breeze stirred; nor was it an animal or another human, for there was no one and nothing else in that still place; it was the sound of his own sandals moving in the grass, wonderfully amplified. When he realized this, he laughed, and his laughter was perfectly returned to him from all around. He had raised his arms then, and when the theatre stilled, he had spoken one word—his own name. Instantly it returned, not distorted, but large and perfect,
GALEN.
In awe of the magic of that charmed spot he had not repeated it but had stood receiving spectral applause, applause that was not for him alone but also for his namesake, the great healer who had attended Marcus Aurelius himself and, perhaps, some who had traveled from Rome to civilize this wild land. Galen. He had never forgotten how his name had sounded in that tiny, perfect amphitheatre. . . .

So now, peering into the mouth of the dragon's cave, and again more curious than afraid, he detected sounds that he could not at first identify, although he thought them to be small sounds swollen unnaturally large—a flat droning that shifted suddenly and repeatedly in pitch, as if it had been turned sideways—an insect! But beneath that, far beneath that sound were others echoing up through the serpentine corridors with a blessed faintness—for they were terrible, like the shrieks of demented children and the howls of tortured beasts. It was in answer to these that Galen spoke another name,
Vermithrax!
He heard it swallowed by the corridor for a long moment, and then given back, still in a whisper but a whisper magnified to enormity: VERMMMMMITHRAXXXX. Instinctively he recoiled. Nothing followed the name but echoes and diminishing reverberations, and then the reverberations dwindled to whispers and the whispers, finally, to unintelligible rustlings.

Carefully, clutching the amulet, Galen turned and descended from the ledge. He had decided on a plan of attack, and for the first time he was frightened—frightened lest the task be beyond 'him. His heart thumped wildly. Skidding and slipping, he returned to where Valerian knelt, clasping something and frowning slightly, abstractedly, as if someone had just asked her directions and she did not know the way. Here he turned, and into his right hand he took the amulet, feeling it pulse like a living thing against his palm. With his raised fist he blotted from sight the entrance to the cave, and he addressed an enormous boulder posed just above the cave's mouth. Speaking with utter authority and confidence, certain even of the Latin, he said in a voice that was uncannily like Ulrich's, "Now, great stone, hear my command:
Tu saxum sax-orum, in adversum monteur—operam da! Nunc te demitte in super latibulum inquinatum draconis!"

The amulet shuddered in his hand, but did not burn him. In that swooning moment he felt that everything he was, and had been, and would ever be, was concentrated in the tiny stone and then released, and that he himself, pure force, hurtled toward the boulder. But when he opened his eyes he was still standing beside Valerian, who had risen to her feet, saying in an awestricken little voice, "It . . . it's
falling!"
Indeed, the huge boulder had tipped forward and, with a crash that shook the hillside and the valley, tumbled to the ledge in front of the cave, sealing the entrance completely. "You
did
it," Valerian shouted, gripping his arm, her grief forgotten.