The Dragon Book (59 page)

Silence filled the world.

Then the dragon got up. Yes—his great head must have touched the roof of the sky for stars, scraped off per haps by accident, all at once hurtled down, gleaming and noiselessly spitting, fading, dead.

Anlut saw the vast expansion of the dragon’s sides as the bellows of Ulkioket’s lungs sucked at the air, swallowing it, in and in. Anlut heard the sound where no other sound was to be heard. Ulkioket was filling himself with breath, which in a few moments he would breathe
out
again upon the hero. It was the ice-breath that killed all living things, froze them and mounded them over, not with stones but with ice.

Did Anlut wonder then if even he, born out of the blast-ice-breath long before, could withstand this attack?

Never. Or rather, it did not occur to him.

In amazement, almost a curious kind of religious awe, he observed what Ulkioket did.

Then: an instant of stasis. The dragon was replete with air.

And after this—

Ulkioket breathed outward.

It was nothing like storm or gale, not even like the freezing clutch of liquid winter sea, or the funnel through the ice up from which Anlut had climbed. No, no, nothing like that.

The breath passed over and through Anlut. His outer skin received it, and his inner body too. It dazzled and burn ed in his nostrils, in his lungs, his belly, his blood and arteries. His clothing changed instantly to glass which—equally quickly—grew brittle, shattering and falling off him like the stars knocked off the sky by the dragon’s crest. His spear became thick with ice and broke as well, and the knife—the knife
melted
, as if in the fire of its making, and curled right up in a serpentine shape, with melted droplets hung there in its new sheath of ice.

But such triumph tore through Anlut too that he shouted aloud. And his voice came out with no difficulty. And when he raised his arms, they rose without trouble. And when he began to spin about and
dance
in the moon-gone dark, his limbs and body obeyed him. Laughing and leaping, he pranced before the dragon of ice. Which watched him then, only sitting back again, paws outstretched, head lowered a little now on the long neck, possibly to see him better.

Eventually, Anlut ran forward and jumped up to balance on the huge right fore-paw. He stood there, laughing and naked, his white hair flying. And he called upwards into the wise, unthinking,
thinking
face with its human eyes.

“You created me. You’ve fathered your own death in me. Here I am, unkillable by you. Now I need only find a way to destroy
you
, Ulkioket. But breathe again, dragon. I
liked
it. To me—your ice is a hearth-fire. It makes me
warm
.”

LATER, the dragon shifted himself. And as though by prior agreement, Anlut jumped down from the foot he had stood on. There had been no observable response.

When the dragon rose, Anlut gazed up and up the height of him. The sky was black by then and the stars also setting. Without prelude, Ulkioket turned and resumed his inexorable march along the world. In fifty heartbeats, he had climbed far up among the mountains of ice. And in less than thirty heartbeats, Anlut was following him, moving at his trained, unflagging, striding trot.

Like this then, naked and barefoot, unarmed, and now even unsleeping, the hero chased the dragon, as night turned to sunup and sunpass passed back to night, over and over again.

Anlut did not need to consider anything now, save some way to slay Ulkioket. To journey so fast, endlessly, tirelessly, without any protection from the winter, was no problem for him. Presumably he had only worn clothes or carried weapons from thoughtless custom, one more learned thing that was actually useless to him. Nor did he need to eat, which at first faintly surprised him when he remembered it. Nothing then, truly nothing but the chase mattered. The chase—and any weapon that might survive the dragon’s blast of breath and penetrate his scaled surface.

That Anlut’s garments and knife had been obliterated or ruinously transformed, as such items never were in the case of any of the dragon’s victims that Anlut had ever before seen, appeared to be the result of Anlut’s own total resistance to the ice-blast. Caught between him and the dragon’s force, they had become a sort of sacrifice, like driftwood in flames.

As the sunpasses and darknesses uncoiled in months, the terrain altered, grew similar to earlier terrain, became different again, familiar again. But one last idea stayed fixed in Anlut’s dragon-occupied mind.

He and the dragon were equal.

Therefore, something must come from this. The
answer
must come from this.

Whenever the dragon rested, then Anlut rested too. He lay about a hundred feet away, or a little less perhaps. He did not sleep; neither, he thought, did the dragon. Yet sometimes, though awake, Anlut seemed to himself to have left his own cold, hard body, and to be standing right beside Ulkioket. Then, in his trance-state, the hero
examined
his quarry.

All the while. Through his shining, unreadable, human eyes, Ulkioket in turn watched Anlut, or his dream-ghost, moving round him. Never at this time did the dragon use the blast of his breath against the man.

Nor did the dragon ever apparently attempt to out distance Anlut by any major amount.

IT was midwinter.

The Northland lights blazed in the sky, wild purple and bronze and wolf-eye yellow.

And coming over the hill, down which the dragon had preceded him, Anlut saw a village below, there against the frozen edges of the sea.

Anlut’s heart seemed to stop.

Then it shouted to him:
Umber! Umber! Umber!

Maybe Ulkioket walked more leisurely now. His tail moved after him in shimmering riverine eddies.

Anlut broke into new speed. He raced. He flew.

Down the hill, over the ice, running till he ran beside the river of the tail, leaping it over and over as it lashed across his path.

By the huge feet of Ulkioket, Anlut sped. Up level with the tower of the breast and head and neck. Then
past
him—past the dragon, forward along the plain. Anlut bolted to the open snow about half a mile above the village.

Here he turned, breathed in the bitter crystal of the night, sucking up breath to yell.

“No further!” he ranted to the dragon, as it stepped and swung nearer and nearer. Holding up his arms, Anlut bellowed through the dome of lights. “
No!
Let them
be
!”

His voice came sure and loud; even in the distant misty village of ice-towers, where smokes must rise as women cooked, and the men were mending, and the sled-wolves waiting for cuts of meat and bones, and the boys playing with a rag ball, even
there
, they must hear the curious sound, not knowing what it was, or that it cried to save them.

The dragon too came to a stop.

He gazed at Anlut, and in the dragon’s eyes, the hero noticed, for the very first time, a strangeness, perhaps great intelligence, a sort of compassion—pity.

While the huge body swelled, Ulkioket’s lungs filling up and up with the crystal air that Anlut had already dragged into his own.

The blast-breath was being prepared. At any second, it would be unleashed. The village would freeze, dead in three seconds. All those lives—

Anlut hurtled forward. He was springing to tear out, with his bare hands, the dragon’s tongue—its teeth—the tender, merciful eyes—when the gust of murder erupted.

Caught in the savage force of it, Anlut was flung upward into that crystal air. It seemed to him he felt his back slam against the flickering arch of the Northland lights. Breath was knocked from him. He fell earthward again, and landed at the dragon’s feet. The vast head, dwarfing his body, leant near.

Anlut could not move. He lay and stared, wondering if now, against all former evidence, he too would die. But he had not been frozen, only winded. As his vision cleared, he beheld every delicate graven scale on Ulkioket’s forehead. The dragon smelled only of ice and open land. A golden thought seemed to move in his right eye. Without doubt merely a reflection of the lights.

Then Ulkioket moved back several of his own paces, which took him a great distance away.

Anlut pushed himself to his feet, shook himself. He was not hurt, not even bruised. But his cold blood boiled with frustration and fury, a terror and despair that never before had he felt in all his life.

He cursed the dragon, using half-remembered maledictions of the tribes. He shouted now a kind of lament, almost wordless.
Yes,
it said,
I have failed. I’ve found no means to kill you. But once more, this time in front of me, you have slain my fellow-men.

Never in the past had he felt such connection to or sorrow for humankind. He, who was, at his roots, mortal. Yet in the human eyes of the dragon, surely Anlut had glimpsed pity.

The hero turned from Ulkioket and the unachievable task of ending him. The hero glared towards the murdered village by the ice-armoured sea.

Anlut’s heart stopped for the second time.

Through low mist, under the flutter of lights, was that smoke which rose still on the shore? The ice-towers—still visible? And something ran there—what—
what
? A little sled with perhaps a tiny figure on it, drawn by six tiny pale things—living wolves …?

Looking behind him, Anlut found that the dragon had vanish ed. Silent as mist, Ulkioket had slid away from him, left him. He could see the marks of the reptilian feet, and where these disappeared at a place of harder ice.

Anlut searched a time, up and down. Of the dragon he could discover nothing else, and it came to Anlut that the dragon-like iridescence overhead had helped disguise Ulkioket’s going away.

In a sort of bleak madness finally, defeated, the hero went towards the village. The sled had vanished too by then—he had imagined it obviously. But—smokes still lifted, unless it was the mist. The ice-towers stood—unlessthey were
only
ice.

Could Anlut have deflected or absorbed the blast of death? He did not think so, although he had done all he could. And even in his turmoil, he could feel the joyous warmth of the blast tingling in him. Like a promise, or a birthright.

WHEN he was near, the head wolves began to yap a warning. But all about the signs lay that the ice-breath had reached this far. Indeed blast-ice had partly formed, standing up in a jagged unfinished palisade, thin as damaged glass. Over a low wall, made only of ordinary ice-brick, Anlut saw five of the guard wolves padding up.

They were white. No, it was more than that. Though heavily furred, there was a sort of shift and shimmer on them, a waver of the colours now streaming along the sky and off into the west. The eyes of the wolves were cold blue, like the hearts of bergs in miniature.