Monsters and Magicians (22 page)

The dragon lashed out at a spearman with its tapering tail, to gain nothing other than a bloody gash near the tail tip for its efforts, but as the circle contracted more, it did it again, then again, spraying blood each time, but still trying to strike one of the odd, two-legged creatures with the member.

When it suddenly lowered its toothy head and

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rushed at one of the encircling spearmen, the man danced back out of the way of the lunge, while others came in from sides and rear to jam the sharp points of spears into muscles and between ribs, then drew them out to stab again or get out of the way of those gnashing jaws, that whipping if tattered tail and the horny claws on the feet.

"A shrewd stroke, Matsuda," growled Sergeant Kiyomoto, adding, "See how the blood bubbles coming out of that hole your spear made in him? You stabbed a lung that time."

The monster continued to turn round and round, its tongue flickering, both eyes and tongue detecting more of the two-legged things with the long, pointed, hurtful claws in any direction and every direction. It had been hurt but was not yet in any way really injured or crippled, and its lunges still were feist as ever, but the luck of the skilled dragon-hunters continued to hold and those at whom the monster lunged were able to avoid his teeth, claws and tail, while their comrades fleshed their waiting spears again and again, driving the steel points through the scaly hide and deep into muscles and internal organs.

After a few furious minutes of the contest, more than just the dragon's jaws and head were bloody; the marks of stabs and gashes speckled his hide in scores, each of them running blood. Ominously, more than just the one of the thoracic wounds now was sending forth bubbly blood, and the monster had ceased to either hiss or roar, needing all the air it could still get for its efforts in the battle against the horde of elusive would-be kill-thieves.

In the course of yet another furious rush at one of

the two-legged things that, like the others before, always managed to stay just beyond range of teeth or claws, the monster's gory flank brushed one of the spearmen hard enough to send his slight, five-foot body spinning, letting go his spear and deliberately taking bruises and abrasion in falling in order to use both hands to give protection to his precious, steel-rimmed glasses.

Having missed as was become usual catching the one it had lunged at, the dragon ignored the things sticking into its body to turn and go after the creature just arising from the ground and lacking its claw. That was when brawny Sergeant Kiyomoto plunged into the fray, moving far faster than it might have seemed possible for so big and broad and thick-limbed a man. With a full-strength, two-armed swing of his broad, cleaver-bladed axe, he inflicted a huge gash deep into the dragon's meaty thigh, and when the monster next made to put its weight upon that ruined leg, it collapsed beneath him, its main tendon now severed.

Helpless to do otherwise, the creature sank upon its belly, using its remaining rear leg and the two shorter front ones to support its weight as it still tried to get at its tormentors with teeth or tail. But now the spearmen closed in. Following the established pattern, they each moved to a designated spot and, from that spot, always maintaining maximum distance from the snapping jaws of the crippled beast, thrust their spears into enough places to pin down legs and tail firmly. Others of them stabbed hard into places they knew from flaying dead dragons were

openings in the bone of the snout and only covered by skin and soft tissues; once they had pierced these, they drove the spears down and down, inexorably, until the steel points sank through the tongue and into the flesh and gristle beneath it to grate on the bone of the lower jaw itself.

And that was when Sergeant Kiyomoto once more swung up his axe and brought it downward in a blur, to cleanly sever the big dragon's spine with but the single blow. That done, a couple of the spearmen left their places and used their bloody weapons to keep the thrashing tail still enough for long enough for the other axeman to take it off near the body. When the taloned feet had all been axed off, the jerking, quivering dragon was rolled over onto its back and the flaying of the torn and multiply holed hide was commenced by the officer, using his wakazashi or shortsword. Then the sergeant took over command of the skinning, cleaning and butchering, sending a party back to the stockaded log house for equipment and supplies.

As Kaoru stood off to one side, observing the laboring men and their sergeant, noting the dexterous way in which the big noncom handled the wakazashi of the dead tank officer, he once more felt his old frustration that he could not wean the sergeant away from the axe and persuade him to use one of the three spare katanas instead.

The oddly shaped axe blade was not made of steel but of some bronzen alloy. It had been discovered during the final cleaning-out of the log house, part of its rotted, oaken haft still in its socket. It had been

Sergeant Kiyomoto who had found the tool or weapon and also he who had first noted and pointed out to the others how the edge of the verdigrised blade exactly fitted into a deep nick in the thigh bone of one of the dragon skeleton's rear legs, remarking that that wound might well be the reason that the heavy creature had fallen so hard against the wooden column as to bring the world-heavy sod roof and his timbers down to crush or smother to death every living thing inside the house.

In his spare time—though the conscientious man did so many things, supervised so many other activities that Kaoru often wondered when he found the requisite time to sleep or to eat—the sergeant had cleaned the last of the oxidation from off the ancient, thick, heavy blade, honed its long, straight edge to a sharpness the equal of any katana, then fitted and tried a number of hafts of differing shapes and lengths until he found one that had suited him—just about a meter long and as straight as a foo-stave. After that, the axe was his only weapon in dragon-hunts.

When an improperly pinned dragon had bitten off the foot and part of the lower leg of Kaoru's last junior officer as the young man—a former classmate at the Imperial Military Academy of his company commander—had stepped in with his own issue katana to deliver the spine-severing blow, Kaoru, after seeing his friend properly cremated, the ashes gathered and stored, had sent for Kiyomoto.

Despite the burly noncom's blank face, Kaoru had, from dint of his long acquaintance with the man, known that he was less than pleased at being told

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that he now, as second highest ranking man remaining to the fragment of the infantry company, should consider himself an acting officer and, in significance of his new rank, wear one of the three swords available. Also, he would henceforth be required to act the part of opponent in Kaoru's frequent practice bouts with the pair of katana-sized and -shaped staves.

Upon being ordered to choose among the available weapons, the knowledgeable sergeant had obediently done so, selecting the pair of fine antique swords that had been those of the tank officer. But therein the thing had ended. The sergeant had worn the pair only when he felt he must for the sake of his duty to obey and demonstrate his respect for his young officer, but when it came to slaying dragons, he still preferred and invariably used his old bronze axe, whether or not he happened to be wearing one or more of the swords at the moment.

And it was all a terrible waste, Kaoru always thought with sadness, for his bouts of army-style fencing with wooden copies of the bamboo "swords" of traditional kendo had shown him just how quick, powerful, accurate and deadly a swordsman the big, tall sergeant could easily and rapidly become . . . did he put his mind to it. After many long months of regular bouts, vain encouragements to Kiyomoto to put aside his axe and take up a sword to replace it, only to see the very next dragon axed down even while the sergeant might be wearing a sash holding both katanga and wazakashi, the young officer finally had demanded to be told of the real reasons underlying Kiyomoto's fascination for the archaic, bronze

tool rather than the fine, almost equally antique heirloom blades that had clearly been family or clan weapons of the deceased tank officer.

The story he had heard in obedient reply to his demand had been an exceedingly strange one, but as no one ever had known Sergeant Kiyomoto to he for any reason, Kaoru had had no option but to believe him in this instance.

Standing in his accustomed stiff, straight, very military posture, speaking as he always did to any officer or superior, with humble dignity: "My honorable father is truly a smith, as I have often said, sir, but he is that and far more, which last I have left unsaid in times before. For more than six centuries have our ancestors drawn the raw iron from the stones and dirt to produce the finest steel and from that steel to fashion the best of blades. Indeed, the blades of the daisho which I now bear at your insistence were wrought by an ancestor; his mark is upon the tangs. Another ancestor wrought your own blades, sir. But to the present issue, these matters are almost unimportant.

"What is important is the fact that, in addition to being a clan of hereditary smiths, my ancestors also are hereditary priests of Fire and Iron. Long, long before that, they were fashioners and priests of other metals as well: bronze and, even earlier, copper. I, too, am such a priest, sir, this is why all metals speak to me, yield up their secrets to my hands.

"Ours is one of the very oldest of priesthoods, sir, it far antedates Shinto, Buddhism or most others that might be named. It has remained active and viable

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among the select few, passing from father to sons down the endless generations ever since the distant days when true gods did walk upon the earth and breed with beasts to sire the beings we now call men.

"Although these ancient beings looked like men, they were half-gods and, as such, all able to perform true wonders the like of which we mongrelized descendants can only sometimes dream. They could fly like birds, commune silently over great distances even without the machines which we must use to so do. They could make huge, heavy stones float on the air like feathers on the wind and thus easily move them wherever they might wish. They could also shape these stones as easily as a potter shapes soft clay—give round stones sharp angles and edges, make thick stones flat, make rough stones smooth as glass.

"As world ages rolled past, the true gods who had spawned the very first of these man-gods sent silent messages thousands of leagues into the minds of their descendants and thus taught them first how to extract copper from stones and then, long after, how to use tin and other things to make the copper tougher, harder and more durable for the fashioning of weapons and tools with which to replace those of stone, bone, antler and wood.

"But as true men grew ever more numerous upon the earth, in almost all the lands, the blood-heritage of the god-men began to thin, to be all too often diluted by that of the ungod-descended ones who were come of only beasts. Those few clans and fami-

lies that stayed almost pure and retained some few of their once-vast powers ruled over true-men for long and long or, using the remnants of their inherent godliness in other ways, they made of themselves craft-priests. His Imperial Majesty, the Son of Heaven, Emperor of Japan, is the scion of one of the former of those two lines of god-descended ones; I am come of the other, sir."

Kiyomoto had continued, saying, "I am not of anything remotely resembling true purity of god-descent, of course, sir, but neither is the Son of Heaven nor has any other being upon earth been for centuries almost beyond reckoning. But the true gods, from wherever they now dwell, still communicate with those with even bare drops of their heritage, in dreams; those with enough innate abilities or those who, like me, have had the benefit of mental training and discipline from birth can identify these dreams and glean from out the imagery the real meanings of them. This is how I came to first join the Imperial Army, sir."

At last able to articulate, Kaoru demanded, "A dream? You're trying to tell me that a mere dream of a night impelled you to become a simple infantryman in the ranks? A swordsmith from a family and clan of swordsmiths? Man, you need never have gone to war at all; you and your craft are far too valuable to the Empire to waste."

"I know, sir," agreed Sergeant Kiyomoto in his calm humility, "but it was the will of a true god that I do so, and such will is not to be disobeyed lightly. This dictum was impressed upon me from my earliest memories upon Earth in this body, and when my honorable father heard from me of the dream, he could say nothing but that I must obey the will of the god."

"Exactly when was this, Sergeant?" asked Kaoru.

"In the Year of the Rat, as the Buddhists reckon, sir," the burly noncom replied. "In the next year, I was sent with my unit to China, but I knew even then that long years must pass before that for which I was compelled to seek out foreign lands would occur."

"Oh, how did you know? Did this god speak to you and tell you in your dream?" queried the officer.

The noncom allowed his face to relax in a brief, gentle smile. "No, sir, gods are not so obvious. Early in the dream, there was a rat and, at its ending, a cock did ruffle its feathers, raise up its head and loudly crow. It was in that way that I knew that the time when I must be of service to the god would be in the Year of the Cock, you see, sir.

"Now the time of my service is very near. The dream so long ago told me that, near to the time I would be needed by a god, three precious things would come into my possession. One, the first, would be a very ancient and holy artifact which I must keep always by me until the appearance of the being for whom it is intended. The second and third things were to be works of art wrought long ago by a priest of my heritage," he raised his left hand from his side just long enough to pat the sharkskin-covered hilt of the katana, "and that is just what these fine swords are, sir, as I said earlier; under the hilt, cut deeply into the tang, is the personal mark of a priest-smith of my family, a very distant but direct ancestor."