Dragonfield (7 page)

T
HE LAND OF DUN D’ADDIN
is known for its rogues, though how so many could have been crowded into so small and homey a place has never been explained. Dun D’Addin is really only one great hill, a land cast off from its neighbors by its height. Folks there live On-the-Hill, By-the-Hill, Over-the-Hill, and ones still on the run from the law live Under-the-Hill and it gives them all a rather lumpish disposition.

There are no main streets, only rough paths most often laced over with vines: thornbush and prickleweed and the rough-toothed caught-ums. The trees tend to grow sideways away from the hill, dropping the wrinkled and bitter fruit into the borderlands.

Dun D’Addin is a place meant to be passed over or passed through or passed by on the way to somewhere else and that is why there is only the one inn, atop the hill, called—perversely—the Bird and the Babe, though it has little to do with either. It is in that inn, before the great central hearth, that the Hill’s resident rogues gather and try to outwit one another with their boasting tales. They are rather pathetically proud of their reputation for roguery, but it is really only of the smash-and-grab variety. True finesse is, I am afraid, quite beyond them as they found out one evening in front of the fire at the Bird and the Babe, to their eternal chagrin and everlasting regret.

“There was an old fiddling tune called
Nine Points of Roguery
in the land I came from,” said slip-fingered Jok. “But of course that’s absurd.”

“Why?” asked the innkeeper. He knew his role in these discussions. He had a positive genius for keeping conversation, especially brag-tales, flowing. That genius consisted mainly of asking one word questions at the right time.

“Why? Because I can only think of five,” said Jok. “And you have to agree that I am about as roguish a fellow as you are likely to meet in the highways and byways of Dun D’Addin.”

The men at the hearth fire chuckled, each of them silently thinking himself the greater rogue. And besides, Dun D’Addin’s highways were crackled with grass and the byways ruts of mud both in and out of the rainy season.

The innkeeper used his silence to bless Jok. Chuckling men are drinking men, was his thought. He made his money without roguery but by supplying vast quantities of ale to the listeners and supplying to travelers a few straw pallets and a thin blanket for the night.

One florid fat man, a stranger and obviously a merchant by his garb, put up his finger. It was missing the top knuckle. The bottom two signed grotesquely at the innkeeper. “Drinks around,” said the merchant. “I want to hear about these five points of roguery, especially from the mouth of a rogue.”

“Point one,” said Jok, smiling and then sipping on his ale, “is the eye.” He winked at them all and they gave him a laugh.

“Eye?” asked the innkeeper, right in rhythm.

“The eye,” said Jok. “It must be clear and bright and honest-seeming, and never a wink between you and your Pick.” Then he winked again, more broadly this time, and laughed with them.

The listeners settled back in their chairs. The fat man grunted as fat men will, rooting around in his own chair like a pig in wallow, but at last he too was ready. Jok, staring at him openly, patiently, waited to begin.

There was a man, a constant traveler and purveyor of goods not quite his own, if you take my meaning (said Jok), who through a great misfortune had been maimed in the war. But he turned this to his own profit, as you will see. A man who can do that could be king, though his kingdom be no more than a cherrystone and his people only ants.

(Though his kingdom be no more than a muddy hill, said the fat man under his breath, and his people no more than rogues.)

He had, in his travels, acquired a diamond the size of a knuckle and its original owner, the local high sheriff, was not pleased at its disappearance. The borders of the land were sealed and at every turning armed men were posted in pairs to search travelers—and one another—to find the precious jewel.

In the course of their searchings, they had uncovered many a thief and villain, and the trees along the borderlands were festooned with bodies since thievery was rewarded with hanging in those times. It was a heavy harvest.

But that did not worry our traveler. He boldly stepped up the line and had himself searched. He winked at one soldier with a steady eye and let them rip through the innocent seams of his coat. They even cored his apple and examined the pips. He thanked them for preparing his meal and waved as he walked through the orchard of ripe souls. He was careful not to run.

And when he got to the other side of the dark wood, where Dun D’Addin’s hill began, he smiled. Then he popped out the staring false eye into his hand; the real one had been put out in the war. He winkled the diamond from his eyesocket and, whistling, went to sell the jewel at an eye-catching price to the Fence-Who-Lives-On-The-Hill.

“Did he really?” asked the innkeeper, forced to use three words instead of one but still sure of the bargain.

“I knew a man with a blind eye once, but never a socket that could glitter like that,” said a listener. “And I’ve lived in Dun D’Addin all my life, high on it, as they say.” He slapped his thigh. He was a storekeeper by trade and a gambler by inclination and thus poor at both.

Jok smiled at the storekeeper, at the innkeeper, at the fat man awallow in the chair, and then at his newly filled glass, but did not answer. Instead he took a sip of his drink.

“That was a bit of a joke rather than a pointer,” said the florid fat man. “I expected more.” He signed again with his mutilated hand.

“Wounded in the war, sir?” asked Jok at last, staring at the hand without flinching.

“No,” said the fat man. “Caught it in my uncle’s till when I was but a boy. I’ve learned a lot since.” He smiled. “But I’ve come up on the hill, to the home of prosperous thieves, to learn more. So—what is your second point of roguery?”

Jok stared at the grotesque hand with the puckered knuckle in place of a nail. “Point two—the hand,” he said. “Fast and mobile and quicker than the eye.”

“Quicker than a fake eye?” called out a listener, a miller who had given false weight and been driven out of his town before settling atop Dun D’Addin’s hill. They all chuckled, ready to listen again.

There was a surgeon’s apprentice (continued Jok) who lined his pockets with the buying and selling of body parts. Hanged murderers, suicides buried at crossroads, and the pickings after battle were his stock in trade. He did not traffic in the appendages of steady husbands and faithful wives, but had a rather brisk business along the border of Dun D’Addin with the sawn-off limbs of felons, miscreants, and malefactors.

Who bought these parts? For the most, it was alchemists and devil’s worshipers, trespassers in the forbidden zone. I do not think he asked, nor would they have answered him. What he did not know could not hurt, was his motto. His was a grisly but profitable trade.

It happened late one night when he was applying his singular skill and saw to the body of the late and unlamented Strangler of Hareton Heath, a corpse that had one leg shorter than the other because—it was said—he had lived so long on Dun D’Addin’s hill. There came a loud knock on the door, a veritable drumroll of knuckles.

Startled, the surgeon’s apprentice cried out.

“Who is there?” His voice was an agony of squeaks.

“Open in the name of the king’s own law,” came the call.

It was, of course, too late to hide the evidence of his night’s work for that was spilled all about him. And there was no denying his part in it. Evisceration is a messy business; it leaves its own bloody calling cards. Gathering his wits about him—and leaving the late Strangler’s on the table—he donned his black coat and black hat, a midnight disguise.

Just as he slipped out the back door, the king’s law broke down the front.

The lead dragoon spotted the hand of the surgeon’s apprentice still on the door knob. Grabbing onto the hand, the dragoon cried out, “Sir, I have him.”

That, of course, is when the hand came off in his, for it was the Strangler’s hand, hard and horned from its horrible vocation. The apprentice had carried it off with him for just such an emergency.

The soldier, being an honest sort, screamed and dropped the severed claw. In the ensuing melee, the apprentice escaped. It is said he climbed Dun D’Addin in a single breath and was on the far side before he thought to stay. And here he has plied a similar trade—but that is only a rumor and not one that I, at least, can vouch for.

“I’ll give you a hand for that tale,” cried out a lusty listener, the local butcher, clapping loudly but alone.

Jok smiled and bowed his head towards the applause. “So point two is the hand.”

The fat man sighed. “And I expected more from you than yet another joke. I suppose point three is the same?” He scratched under his eye with the mutilated finger.

Jok, fascinated, could not stop staring at him. “No,” he said at last. “As a matter of fact, point three is
very
serious.”

“Three!” said the innkeeper, suddenly remembering his role in the affair. “Three!”

“Point three,” Jok said, tearing his gaze from the fat man and looking again at his audience, which had enlarged by four or five drinkers, much to the innkeeper’s satisfaction. “Point three is the voice. In roguery, that voice must be melodic and cozzening but, in the end, forgettable.”

Ellyne was the fairest girl on any of Dun D’Addin’s borders, the fairest in seven counties if one were to be exact. Her hair was red and curled about her face like little fishhooks ready to catch the unwary ogler. Her skin was the color of berried cream, rosy and white. Not a man but sighed for her, though she seemed oblivious to them all.

One day she was walking out in the woods, not far from the Hill, picking bellflowers for a tisane and listening to the syncopations of the birds, when a rogue from Dun D’Addin chanced by.

Now his name was Vyctor and he was known Under-the-Hill as The Voice, for he could cast the sound of it where he willed. It was his one great trick, that mellifluous traveling tone. With it he had talked jewelers out of their gems, good wives out of their virtue, and a judge out of hanging him. He was
that
good.

Vyctor saw the red-headed Ellyne and was stunned, felled, split and spitted by her beauty. He had heard tell of it, but that had been on Dun D’Addin’s byways where every word is doubled and every truth halved. But those who had praised Ellyne’s beauty hadn’t sung the smallest part of it properly. Vyctor the Voice lost his—and his heart as well. He began to stammer.

Now Ellyne was used to the stammering of men. In fact she was of the belief that—except for her own father and a blind singer in her town—all men above the age of puberty stammered. She was an innocent for sure, and not aware of her beauty, for not a man had been able to string three words together to tell her of it.

But if Vyctor could not speak directly to her, he could still talk by throwing his voice, and so he spoke to her from the nearest tree.

“Beauteous maid,” the birch began.

Ellyne turned round and about, the movement making her hair a halo and bringing a magnificent flush to her cheek. For a moment even the birch stammered; then it went on.

“Beauteous maid, you make my sap run fast; you make my bark tingle. I would embrace you.”

Well, Ellyne had never heard a tree talk before and she was fascinated. It was so well spoken and, besides, it was giving her compliments instead of the stuttering and spitting and gawking she was used to from all the men of her acquaintance. She moved closer to hear more.

Vyctor took a step or two in the tree’s direction and the birch continued its serenade.

“My love for you is deeply rooted,” said the birch. “Do not ever leaf me.”

Ellyne sighed.

Just then the wind came up and blew the birch branches about. One grazed Ellyne’s arm. She shrieked—for she was a good girl and not about to be touched before the wedding banns had been posted.

Vyctor leaped forward, his sword suddenly in hand. “I … I … I will save you,” he cried, forgetting for that instant that the birch was his spokestree. He lay about vigorously and had soon carved up enough firewood to keep the hearths of Dun D’Addin warm for a week.

“Monster!” cried Ellyne. “You have slain my own true love.” She fell upon the woodpile and wept.

From the back she was not as beautiful as the front and Vyctor came immediately to his senses. Besides, her noisy sobbing had alerted the local dragoons, all of whom were in love with her, and a company of them marched into the woods, bayonets fixed.

Vyctor was arrested and tried, but his voice having made a full recovery, he was released.

Ellyne carried half a dozen of the finest birch branches home and placed them tenderly over her mantel. Then she took the surname Tree. She was careful not to burn wood or eat vegetables thereafter and wore widow’s weeds the rest of her short life.

The laughter that greeted Jok’s third tale signaled another round of ale. The innkeeper was just pouring when the miller said, “If that’s three, what’s four?”