Tales of Ethshar Page 5

  She opened a sleepy eye, and saw nothing at all.

  “So maybe she just burned a cornstalk or something,” a second voice said.

  “I don’t even see a tinderbox,” the first replied.

  “I don’t either, but what do I know? I saw sparks here, and here she is—it must’ve been her. Maybe she had some little magic spell or something—she looks like a city girl.”

  “Maybe there was someone with her.”

  “No, she wouldn’t be lying here all alone, then. No one would be stupid enough to leave a girl unprotected.”

  The first voice giggled unpleasantly. “Not if they knew we were around, certainly.”

  “She’s pretty young,” the second said dubiously.

  Sirinita was completely awake now; she realized she was looking at the rich black earth of the farm. She turned her head, very carefully, to see who was speaking.

  “She’s awake!” the first voice said. “Quick!”

  Then rough hands grabbed her, and her tunic was yanked up, trapping her arms, covering her face so that she couldn’t see, and pulling her halfway to her feet. Unseen hands clamped around her wrists, holding the tunic up.

  “Not all that young,” someone said, but Sirinita couldn’t hear well enough through the tunic to be sure which voice it was. Another hand touched her now-bare hip.

  Sirinita screamed.

  Someone hit her on the back of the head hard enough to daze her.

  Then she heard Tharn growl.

  It wasn’t a sound she had heard often; it took a lot to provoke the dragon, as a rule.

  “What was that?” one of her attackers asked.

  “It’s a baby dragon,” the other replied. The grip on her left wrist fell away, and she was able to pull her tunic partway down, below her eyes.

  She was in the cornfield, and it was still full night, but the greater moon shone orange overhead, giving enough light to make out shapes, but not colors.

  There were two men, big men, and they both had swords, and Tharn was facing them, growling, his tail lashing snakelike behind him. One of the men was holding her right wrist with his left hand, drawing his sword with his right.

  The other man, sword already drawn, was approaching Tharn cautiously.

  “Dragon’s blood,” he said. “The wizards pay good money for dragon’s blood.”

  He stepped closer, closer—and Tharn’s curved neck suddenly straightened, thrusting his scaly snout to a foot or so from the man’s face, and Tharn spat flame, lighting up the night, momentarily blinding the three humans, whose eyes had all been adjusted to the darkness.

  The man who had approached the dragon screamed horribly, and the other dropped Sirinita’s wrist; thus abruptly released, she stumbled and almost fell.

  When she was upright and able to see again, she saw one man kneeling, both hands covering his face as he continued to scream; his sword was nowhere in sight. The other man was circling, trying to get behind Tharn, or at least out of the line of fire.

  Tharn was growling differently now, a sound like nothing Sirinita had ever heard before. His jaws and nostrils were glowing dull red, black smoke curled up from them, and his eyes caught the moonlight and gleamed golden. He didn’t look like her familiar, bumbling pet; he looked terrifying.

  The uninjured man dove for Tharn’s neck, and the dragon turned with incredible speed, belching flame.

  The man’s hair caught fire, but he dived under the gout of flame and stabbed at Tharn.

  Tharn dodged, or tried to, but Sirinita heard the metal blade scrape sickeningly across those armored scales she had so often scratched herself on.

  Then Tharn, neck fully extended and bent almost into a circle, took his attacker from behind and closed his jaws on the man’s neck.

  Sirinita screamed—she didn’t know why, she just did.

  The first man was still whimpering into his hands.

  The second man didn’t scream, though; he just made a soft grunting noise, then sagged lifelessly across Tharn’s back. His hair was smoldering; a shower of red sparks danced down Tharn’s flank.

  Sirinita turned and ran.

  At first she wasn’t running anywhere in particular; then she spotted a farmhouse with a light in the window. Someone had probably been awakened by the screaming. She turned her steps toward it.

  A moment later she was hammering her fists on the door.

  “Who is it?” someone called. “I’ve got a sword and a spear here.”

  “Help!” Sirinita shrieked.

  For a moment no one answered, but she heard muffled voices debating; then the door burst open and she fell inside.

  “They attacked me,” she said. “And Tharn killed one of them, and…and…“

  “Who attacked you?” a woman asked.

  “Two men. Big men.”

  “Who’s Tharn? Your father?” a man asked.

  “My pet dragon.”

  The man and the woman looked at one another.

  “She’s crazy,” the man said.

  “Close the door,” the woman answered.

  “You don’t think I should try to help?”

  “Do you hear anyone else screaming?”

  The man listened; so did Sirinita.

  “No,” the man said. “But I hear noises.”

  “Let them take care of it themselves, then.”

  “But.…” The man hesitated, then asked, “Was anyone hurt?”

  “The men who attacked me. Tharn hurt them both. I think he killed one.”

  “But this Tharn was all right when you left?” the woman asked.

  Sirinita nodded.

  “Then leave well enough alone for now. We’ll go out in the morning and see what’s what. Or if this Tharn comes to the door and speaks fair—we’ve the girl to tell us if it’s the right one.”

  The man took one reluctant final look out the door, then closed and barred it, while the woman soothed Sirinita and led her to a corner by the fire where she could lie down. The man found two blankets and a feather pillow, and Sirinita curled up, shivering, certain she would never sleep again.

  She was startled to wake up to broad daylight.

  “You told us the truth last night,” her hostess remarked.

  Sirinita blinked sleep from her eyes.

  “About your dragon, I mean. He’s curled up out front. At first my man was afraid to step past him, after what you’d said about his fighting those two men, but he looks harmless enough, so at last he ventured it.”

  “I’m sorry he troubled you,” Sirinita said.

  “No trouble,” she said.

  “I have to get home,” Sirinita said, as she sat up.

  “No hurry, is there?”

  Sirinita hesitated. “It’s a long walk back to the city.”

  “It is,” the woman admitted. “But isn’t that all the more reason to have breakfast first?”

  Sirinita, who had had no supper the night before, did not argue with that; she ate a hearty meal of hot buttered cornbread, apples, and cider.

  When she was done she tried to feed Tharn, but the dragon wasn’t hungry.

  When the farmer showed her what he had found in the cornfield she saw why. Both her attackers were sprawled there—or at any rate, what was left of them. Tharn was still a very small dragon; he had left quite a bit.

  She looked down at the dragon at her side; Tharn looked up at her and blinked. He stretched his wings and belched a small puff of flame.

  “Come on,” Sirinita said. She waved a farewell to her hosts—she never had learned their names, though she thought they’d been mentioned—then started walking up her own shadow, heading westward toward Ethshar.

  It was late afternoon when, footsore and frazzled, she reached Eastgate with Tharn still at her heel. She made her way down East Road to the city’s heart, then turned south into the residential district that had always been her home.

  Her parents were waiting.

  “When you weren’t home by midnight we were worried,
so this morning we hired a witch,” her mother explained, after embraces and greetings had been exchanged. “She said you’d be home safe some time today, and here you are.” She looked past her daughter at the dragon. “And Tharn, too, I see.” She hesitated, then continued, “The witch said that Tharn saved your life last night. We really can’t keep him here, Siri, but we can find a home for him somewhere.…”

  “No,” Sirinita interrupted, hugging her mother close. “No, don’t do that.” She closed her eyes, and images of the man with the burned face screaming, the other man with his hair on fire and his neck broken, the two of them lying half-eaten between the rows of corn, appeared.

  Tharn had been protecting her, and those men had meant to rape her and maybe kill her, but she knew those images would always be there.

  Tharn was a dragon, and that was what dragons did.

  “No, Mother,” she said, shuddering, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “Get a wizard and have him killed.”

  About “Portrait of A Hero”

  Lester del Rey, my editor at the time, had discovered an artist whose work he really liked, by the name of Michael Pangrazio. He wanted to do a project to showcase the guy’s work, so he got together with his assistant Risa Kessler (at least, I think she was his assistant; I never dealt with her directly) and put together an anthology called Once Upon A Time, which would feature “modern fairy tales” by all Del Rey’s top fantasy authors. Each story would be illustrated with a painting by Michael Pangrazio. I was very flattered to be included in this, but wasn’t sure about writing a “modern fairy tale.” On the other hand, one of my sisters had asked me to write a story with a prophecy in it, so I had started one that I had originally intended to be a novel, but once I started working on it I realized it didn’t have enough plot for a novel. I abandoned it unfinished.

  When Once Upon A Time came along I finished the prophecy story, cut it down even more, and sent it to Lester, who bought it. My sister got her prophecy novel a few years later, in the form of Taking Flight.

  Portrait of A Hero

  1.

  The dragon atop the mountain loomed over the village like a tombstone over a grave, and Wuller looked up at it in awe.

  “Do you think it’ll come any closer?” he whispered to his aunt.

  Illuré shook her head.

  “There’s no telling, with dragons,” she said. “Particularly not the really big ones. One that size must be as experienced and cunning as any human that ever lived.”

  Something was odd about her voice. Wuller glanced at her face, which was set in a rigid calm, and realized that his aunt Illuré, who had faced down a runaway boar with nothing but a turnspit, was terrified.

  Even as he looked, her calm broke; her eyes went wide, her mouth started to open.

  Wuller whirled back in time to see the dragon rising from its perch, its immense wings spread wide to catch the wind. It rose, wheeled about once, and then swept down toward the village, claws outstretched, like a hawk diving on its prey.

  For a moment Wuller thought it was diving directly at him, and he covered his face with his hands, as if he were still a child.

  Then he remembered how high that mountaintop was, and his mind adjusted the scale of what he had just seen—the dragon was larger and farther than he had assumed. Ashamed of his terror, he dropped his hands and looked up again.

  The dragon was hovering over the village, directly over his own head. Wuller felt a tugging at one arm, and realized that Illuré was trying to pull him out from under the great beast.

  He yielded, and a moment later the creature settled to the ground in the village common, the wind from its wings stirring up a cloud of grey dust and flattening the thin grass. The scent of its hot, sulphurous breath filled the town.

  A swirl of dust reached Wuller, and he sneezed.

  The dragon’s long neck dipped down, and its monstrous head swung around to look Wuller directly in the eye from a mere six or seven feet away.

  He stared back, frozen with fear.

  Then the head swung away again, the neck lifted it up, and the mighty jaws opened.

  The dragon spoke.

  “Who speaks for this village?” it said, in a voice like an avalanche.

  “It talks!” someone said, in tones of awe and wonder.

  The dragon’s head swept down to confront the speaker, and it spoke again.

  “Yes, I talk,” it rumbled. “Do you?”

  Wuller looked to see who it was addressing, and saw a young man in blue—his cousin Pergren, just a few years older than himself, who had only recently started his own flock.

  Pergren stammered, unable to answer coherently, and the dragon’s jaws crept nearer and nearer to him. Wuller saw that they were beginning to open—not to speak, this time, but to bite.

  Then a man stepped forward—Adar, the village smith, Wuller’s father’s cousin.

  “I’ll speak for the village, dragon,” he called. “Leave that boy alone and say what you want of us.”

  Wuller had always admired Adar’s strength and skill; now he found himself admiring the smith’s courage, as well.

  The dragon reared up slightly, and Wuller thought it looked slightly amused. “Well!” it said. “One among you with manners enough to speak when spoken to—though hardly in a civil tone!”

  “Get on with it,” Adar said.

  “All right, if you’re as impatient as all that,” the dragon said. “I had intended to make a few polite introductions before getting down to business, but have it your way. I have chosen this village as my home. I have chosen you people as my servants. And I have come down here today to set the terms of your service. Is that clear and direct enough to suit you, man?”

  Wuller tried to judge the dragon’s tone, to judge whether it was speaking sarcastically, but the voice was simply too different from human for him to tell.

  “We are not servants,” Adar announced. “We are free people.”

  “Not any more,” the dragon said.

  2.

  Wuller shuddered again at the memory of Adar’s death, then turned his attention back to the meeting that huddled about the single lantern in his father’s house.

  “We can’t go on like this,” his father was saying. “At a sheep a day, even allowing for a better lambing season next spring than the one we just had, we’ll have nothing left at all after three years, not even a breeding pair to start anew!”

  “What would you have us do, then?” old Kirna snapped at him. “You heard what it said after it ate Adar. One sheep a day, or one person, and it doesn’t care which!”

  “We need to kill it,” Wuller’s father said.

  “Go right ahead, Wulran,” someone called from the darkness. “We won’t mind a bit if you kill it!”

  “I can’t kill it, any more than you can,” Wuller’s father retorted, “but surely someone must be able to! Centuries ago, during the war, dragons were used in battle by both sides, and both sides killed great numbers of them. It can be done, and I’m sure the knowledge isn’t lost…”

  “I’m not sure of that!” Kirna interrupted.

  “All right, then,” Wulran shouted, “maybe it is lost! But look at us here! The whole lot of us packed together in the dark because we don’t dare light a proper council fire, for fear of that beast! Our livestock are taken one by one, day after day, and when the sheep run out it will start on us—it’s said as much! Already we’re left with no smith but a half-trained apprentice boy, because of that thing that lurks on the mountain. We’re dying slowly, the whole lot of us—would it be that much worse to risk dying quickly?”

  An embarrassed silence was the only reply.

  “All right, Wulran,” someone muttered at last, “what do you want us to do?”

  Wuller looked at his father expectantly, and was disappointed to see the slumped shoulders and hear the admission, “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe if we all attacked it…” Wuller suggested.

  “Attacked
it with what?” Pergren demanded. “Our bare hands?”

  Wuller almost shouted back, “Yes,” but he caught himself at the last moment and stayed silent.

  “Is there any magic we could use?” little Salla, who was barely old enough to attend the meeting, asked hesitantly. “In the stories, the heroes who go to fight dragons always have magic swords, or enchanted armor.”

  “We have no magic swords,” Illuré said.

  “Wait a minute,” Alasha the Fair said. “We don’t have a sword, but we have magic, of a sort.” Wuller could not be certain in the darkness, but thought she was looking at her sister Kirna as she spoke.

  “Oh, now, wait a minute…” Kirna began.

  “What’s she talking about, Kirna?” Pergren demanded.

  “Kirna?” Illuré asked, puzzled.

  Kirna glanced at the faces that were visible in the lantern’s glow, and at the dozens beyond, and gave in.

  “All right,” she said, “but it won’t do any good. I’m not even sure it still works.”

  “Not sure what still works?” someone asked.

  “The oracle,” Kirna replied.

  “What oracle?” someone demanded, exasperated.

  “I’ll show you,” she answered, rising. “It’s at my house; I’ll go fetch it.”

  “No,” Wulran said, with authority, “we’ll come with you. All of us. We’ll move the meeting there.”

  Kirna started to protest, then glanced about and thought better of it.

  “All right,” she said.

  3.

  The thing gleamed in the lantern-light, and Wuller stared, fascinated. He had never seen anything magical before.

  The oracle was a block of polished white stone—or polished something, anyway; it wasn’t any stone that Wuller was familiar with. A shallow dish of the smoothest, finest glass he had ever seen was set into the top of the stone, glass with only a faint tinge of green to it and without a single bubble or flaw.

  Kirna handled it with extreme delicacy, holding it only by the sides of the block and placing it gently onto the waiting pile of furs.

  “It’s been in my family since the Great War,” she said quietly. “One of my ancestors took it from the tent of a northern sorcerer when the Northern Empire fell and the victorious Ethsharites swept through these lands, driving the enemy before them.”