Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (11 page)

John had turned away, discreetly steadying himself on the half-carved, half-wickerwork figurehead on the boat’s stern. He was stripped to his boots, doeskin breeches, and singlet;

evening light gleamed on the round lenses of his spectacles as he dragged the boat nearer to the small furnace that had been burning for the past hour. The bandages on his chest and shoulder couldn’t completely hide the bruised flesh; under the bruises, the scars taken in an encounter with another dragon shone dark.

Heavily loaded though it was, the boat moved easily. It was mounted on wheels wrought, like the machinery in its midsection, from the lightweight steels and alloys made by the gnomes. When the King’s troops had arrived in the Winterlands two years ago, John had taken the occasion to ride to the gnomes’ Deep at Wyldoom, having heard they needed a warrior to deal with a nest of cave-grues they’d disturbed in their digging. This machinery, made to John’s specifications from designs he’d found in an ancient text of Heronax, had been his pay for two weeks of peril and horror in the dark.

“The year Adric was born, Jen and I were trapped by skelks and holed up for near two months in the Moonwood,” he said to Muffle. “Jen’ll be all right, wherever she is, but I can’t wait for her to return. It’s ten days that Ian’s been gone.”

“Ian’ll be okay.” Adric stepped close, a kind of bluff warrior’s defiance in his stance. Mag toddled silently at his heels and began to examine the wicker boat with her usual careful intentness. The boy caught her hand and drew her back, having had plenty of experience with Mag’s investigations. “And Mama can take care of any old crummy mage.” “Yeah.” John grinned, and tousled his son’s hair. “But it may take her a bit.” He looked back at Muffle, eyes wary in his sweat-streaked face.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Johnny.”

John raised his eyebrows, looking surprised. “I’m not telling you to go take a long walk because none of this is your business, but that’s ’cause you’re me brother and bigger than me.” “John, you should be in bed!” Aunt Jane, the oldest and stoutest of old Lord Aver’s three sisters, bustled down the broken stair from the courtyard above. “Muffle, I’m surprised at you for letting him be up!”

The blacksmith began to protest that he wasn’t his brother’s nursie, but Aunt Jane went on “And mucking with all your heathen machinery when you should be resting!” She frowned disapprovingly at John’s telescope, mounted on the rear gunwale. “And bringing the children, too! They’ll end up as bad as you.”

“Papa didn’t bring us,” Adric declared stoutly. “We snuck.” He stepped to his father’s side as though to defend him, still keeping a conscientious grip on his sister’s hand. “Honestly!” Aunt Jane paused and looked the boat up and down, though none of the aunts had much interest in their nephew’s scholarly and mechanistic pursuits. She turned away with a shrug the next moment, scolding, as if the curious hybrid look of the thing had not struck her at all: boat-shaped, but, save for its bottom planking, made of lacquered wicker; wheeled and mounted with a whole array of sails, yards, booms, and masts as well as its strange clockwork and wires, fan-blades and springs. She did not seem to associate it with the framework of withes that stood above the furnace’s stumpy chimney. Crates of folded silk lay open beside it, amid long skeins of gnome-woven cable, steel rings, and leather valves.

“Now you come upstairs,” she ordered. “Come on! Gallivanting off all over the countryside when you should be resting …”

She reascended the stair, muttering, and Sergeant Muffle, with a worried glance back at John, picked up little Mag as if she’d been a single white poppy and carried her after. As soon as they were out of sight John sat down rather quickly on the pile of wood beside the furnace. “Are you okay?” Adric came over to him, like John stripped to britches, boots, and singlet, hands folded over the hilt of the little sword that hung at his belt. It was only with difficulty that John persuaded him to take the weapon off when he went to bed.

“Just send me down another dragon,” said John cheerily. “I’ll wring his neck for him like a chicken.”

Adric grinned and hoisted himself onto the woodpile at his father’s side. “Are you going to go away and find Ian?”

“I’ve got to, son.”

“Can I come with you? You’re going to need help,” added the boy, seeing his father draw breath for the inevitable refusal. “Even if you do take along all Mama’s poisons and your dragon-slaying machine. You’ve never tried it out against a real dragon, you know. I can use a sword.” He patted his blade confidently. “And I can shoot and rope and throw a javelin. You know I’m better than Ian.”

This was true. Since the boys were small John had worked to teach them his skills with weapons, knowing they’d need them in the Winterlands, maybe long before they came to manhood. Where Ian learned intently, the younger boy devoured his lessons with a blithe ferocity that left John in no doubt as to who would take over as protector of the Winterlands when he himself was gone. And probably do a better job of it, he reflected ruefully, than he ever had. “You’re going to tell me you’d really like to,” sighed Adric, “but you can’t. Is that right?” “That’s right, son,” said John. He plucked a twig from the heap of logs and made mice-scampers for Skinny Kitty, who had come down to investigate the courtyard. The cat merely regarded it incuriously and settled herself to wash. “There’ll be folk to supper, and for dancing, but if you could go up to my room while everyone’s busy and bring my bundles down to the Milkweed here“—he jerked his thumb at the boat—”I’d take it as a favor; if me credit still runs to favors.” Adric’s eyes sparkled, and he sprang down from the woodpile and raced up the stairs like a mountain goat. John followed more slowly, limping and holding on to the wall. He slept for a few hours, with Fat Kitty and Skinny Kitty somnolent gray lumps at his side, and waking, pulled on his jerkin and made a small bundle of clothes, spare boots, plaids, and his shaving razor. Beside this he set the satchel containing all the poisonous ingredients he and Ian had gleaned from Jenny’s study and the house on Frost Fell, all those pots and packets either deadly or merely soporific; and a long bundle of parchment fragments begged from the scriptorium at Corflyn. Then despite the protests of his aunts he limped down to the noise and torchflame of the hall.

There was always someone from the village at the Hold for supper—Jane’s legions of friends, or the brothers and sisters of the Hold servants, sometimes Jenny’s sister Sparrow and her children or Muffle and his family or the long-suffering Father Hiero, whose attempts to perform the proper worship of the Gods in the village were met with universal indifference and a deep-seated stubborn faith in the Old God. John was obliged to retail for Sparrow and Aunt Hol and Cousin Rowanberry all that he’d seen and heard of Cair Corflyn, and all that Rocklys had said of the unrest in the south; the height of the corn and the progress of the new stone water mill and the numbers of the cattle (“What do you mean you don’t know?” demanded old Cram Grabbitch from Ditch Farm. “Can’t you count, boy?”) and what the wives of the southern sergeants wore. It exhausted him, but he was loath to leave. He told himself that this was because it would be weeks before he saw them again, and he kept from even thinking, Never. After supper he brought out the hurdy-gurdy that had been part of his dragon-slayer’s fee four years ago and played the four-hundred-year-old war songs, and children’s rounds, and sentimental ballads he’d learned from a blackened book he found in the ruins of Eldsbouch. Muffle and Adric joined in on the hand drums and Aunt Jane on her wooden flutes. Aunt Rowan and Aunt Hol—Muffle’s mother and his father’s mistress for years—and Peg the gatekeeper danced with surprising lightness in a whirl of plaids and rags and long gray hair.

They were still at music when he said he was going to bed. But as he left the hall, he caught Adric’s eye.

The boy joined him in the kitchen court a few minutes later. Together they descended the stair through warm blue darkness, seeing the smoldering amber eye of the furnace in the old barracks court below, laced and lidded with its frame of willow withe. The night was still and brought them the scents of ripening barley all around the Hold, and the great wet green pong of the marshes north and eastward. The music came to them still, faint and gay and wild, and with it the crying of crickets and frogs. The moon had just lifted clear of the broken horizon, waning but brave and yellow as a pumpkin’s heart.

“They’ll be after me hammer and tongs the minute they know I’m bound away,” said John, as he checked the leather hose that led from the furnace to the great silvery masses of silk, laid out carefully on the broken pavement. During the past few hours they’d begun to lift and move, swelling upward …

In the crimson glare the boy’s face quirked in his wide grin, “You mean you’re afraid Aunt Jane won’t let you go.”

“I’m the Lord of the Hold, I’ll thank you to remember, sir.”

John chucked a short length of elm into the furnace, glad that he’d had servants bring out the cut wood earlier. “Show a bit of respect for an old, tired man.”

But Adric only grinned wider. He knew all about the hammer and tongs. For a time they worked together, stoking the belly of the oven, the heat laving their faces and the gritty white smoke puffing out in the starlight. In time John kicked the door shut and dug in the pouch at his belt for the things he’d gotten from the gnomes of Wyldoom, two or three white stones about as big as crab apples, chalky and soft to the touch. The furnace had a sort of iron basket in the top of its chimney, and into this John put the stones, then checked again the great swelling sheets of gray silk. Ropes, valves, and hose were adjusted as the ancient books had said, and as John had figured out over months of experimentation and trial.

“Is it magic?” Adric whispered in time.

He was hard to impress. John felt a trifle pleased with himself for having done so.

“The balloons aren’t, no.” He stepped back and leaned unobtrusively against the boat for support. “Heronax of Ernine, twelve hundred years ago, used hot air to fill a silk bag and flew seventy-five miles in it, at least so he claims, all the way from Ernine, wherever that was, to the Silver Island. In Volume Four of Dotys’ Histories—or is it in Polyborus?—there’s talk of men building flying machines with the help of gnomes’ magic, though whether they were balloons or like that winged machine I made a few years ago it doesn’t say. And I’ll thank you not to giggle about that machine,“he added with dignity. ”It nearly worked.”

“So did your parachute,” pointed out Adric, mispronouncing the archaic word. “And the glass bottle for going underwater. And the rockets. And …”

“Now, each and every one of those things worked in the past,” retorted John, shedding his rough jerkin in the heat. “It’s only me dragon-slayin’ machine that’s completely new, and all me own invention. If the ancients could do it, I can do it.”

The silk billowed and shifted, like some huge version of the mice-feet he performed under the blankets of the bed to interest the torporous Fat Kitty—not that they ever did. Torchlight and moonlight flowed in watery patterns over the fabric. Slowly the silk began to rise, as if some great creature beneath were lifting itself out of the ground. Adric came around beside him, hands thrust casually through his sword-belt, trying to appear nonchalant but his eyes enormous. “Hot air rises, y’see. That’s what Cerduces says in the Principia Mundis, and it’s true. If you put a bit of paper or a leaf on a fire, you’ve seen how it swirls up.”

Adric nodded. He was generally less than interested in his father’s scholarly pursuits, and he’d been hearing all his life about the flying machines without ever witnessing anything more impressive than the debacle of the winged vehicle the summer before last. “What happens when the air gets cool?” he asked.

“You come down. You can delay it a bit by takin’ on more than you need and carryin’ weights and such—accordin’ to Cerduces, anyway—but in the end that’s what happens. That’s where the hothwais—them little rocks the gnomes gave me—come in. They charge the air to keep the heat. It’s part of gnome-magic. Gnomes can charge rocks to hold certain kinds of light, to hold sounds, or even hold air around ’em, the same way your mum uses air-spells to swim underwater. I’ve heard rumor about other stuff as well, but the gnomes are damn chary about lettin’ anybody know much of their magic. Now, in that fragment of Ibikus I found over in Eldsbouch it said …”

“And that’s how you’re going to go find the dragon that carried off Ian?”

John was silent. Aware of his son’s eyes on his face; aware, too, that he had never lied to any of his children. Aware that his silence was too long.

Adric said, “You know what happened to Ian, don’t you?” Very quietly, John said, “No.”

“But you think you know.”

He closed his eyes, wishing he could lie. Wishing he could tell his son anything but what he suspected was the truth. “Yes.” The wicker and withy binding of the boat’s gunwales bit into his hands as he closed them hard, and his wounds ached—bled again, he thought, or else it was just exhaustion.

He wished it were possible to wait for Jenny.

Wished it were possible to do this any other way.

Wished he knew if what he was undertaking would even succeed. Adric sounded scared. “Where are you going?”

“To find someone who can help me,” said John. If he doesn’t kill me on sight.

In the days of the heroes a band of mages made slaves of dragons …

He closed his eyes, and the memory of what he had read in that battered half-volume of Juronal returned to him, as if it lay again before his eyes.

In the days of the heroes a band of mages made slaves of dragons.

He saw the blue-and-gold beauty of Centhwevir, bleeding on the black and smoking ground. The flash of crystal in the wizard’s hand. Save a dragon, slave a dragon… The southern mage’s calm intent face. Ian’s alien, hellish smile. John slung his little bundle of clothes into the Milkweed, checked the masts and the rigging, and the machinery that would propel it in calm. He’d flown it before, or its earlier and less efficient brethren, but never so far, nor so heavily laden. The pieces of the dragon-slaying machine that he’d been tinkering with for the past three years, lashed among the foodstuffs and water-skins along the gunwales, narrowed the meagre space almost to nothing.