George caught a whiff of himself and grimaced. Damn that Athena; what was she spritzing him with now? Between his own body odor and the smoke from the central hearth, he could barely stand to breathe.
He stacked the final load of wood against the wall in the kitchen and straightened, then arched his back, stretching it. Chopping and carrying wood was almost better than a circuit on the gym equipment. His muscles felt as if he truly had been exercising, not just imagining it.
He had forgotten for several hours, in fact, that he wasn’t really here; that here didn’t exist except in his mind.
The creeping doubt came back that maybe this was real. He played for a moment with the idea that somehow he really had slipped through a crack in time and space and landed himself in medieval times. A new sheen of sweat burst from his pores, and he felt a whimper in the back of his throat.
Stuck in the Middle Ages, truly, with no doctors or antibiotics, no telephones, and no one whom he knew and loved?
But no, that couldn’t be. What of Belch? There was no such thing as dragons.
But was Belch really a dragon? Maybe he was a holdover from the age of dinosaurs, like some claimed the Loch Ness monster to be. Belch looked similar enough to a crocodile that George could believe he was a product of the natural world.
And the hot spring! That would explain why Belch was here. Some warm ocean current had brought him, and he had found a cozy nest for himself, the cave being the only place he could survive in this chilly climate after the warm current had gone away.
It was plausible.
To believe that, he would also have to believe that Athena’s antique-mall crystal was possessed of some magical power, as was she; and that he couldn’t do.
He would follow Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution was most likely the correct one. He had been hypnotized, that was all.
Besides, time-travel wasn’t possible.
Was it?
He dimly remembered a theory about all time and all matter existing at once, in the same space— that sequential time as everyone knew it was an illusion.
It would be so easy to believe that this was all real; it certainly felt real enough. Perhaps something about that crystal, its structure, the reflections of light, had opened a window from one point to another—
No! It was lunacy to think that way. He had to act as if this was real, to work through the puzzle of this dream, but it was acting only.
He wondered what his mysterious mistress would say if he told her she was not a real person, but instead the personification of his feminine side.
She would probably drag him down to the cavern and throw him over the rail.
And what would a psychologist say, if he confessed he was having lewd thoughts about the faceless personification of a side of himself? Even George himself had to admit there was something perverse about it.
All manner of kinky thoughts were getting into his head. Thoughts of that hood staying on but everything else coming off. Of lush white breasts and rounded hips. Of the robe thrown back over her shoulders and hanging as a backdrop as the mistress walked toward him, naked and inviting. Of her riding atop him, his hands on her waist as she rose and fell, her soft thighs over his hips, her body wet and hot and tight, squeezing him as she reached her climax, moaning . . .
He felt pressure in his groin as he became engorged, his erection stretching against his briefs and leggings. Thank God for the old shirt he had found in one of those chests in the garrison room. It was cut full enough that he was able to get it on, although it was likely made for a smaller man. It smelled musty and was splotched with stains, but it hung down to mid-thigh, concealing all evidence of his physical attraction to the bad-tempered mistress.
“Here’s your supper,” his temptress said, dropping his bowl onto the table with a clunk.
“Thank you.” It was killing him not to know what she looked like. He went to the hot spring basin and washed his hands.
She sat where she had during his lunch, with nothing in front of her.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.
“I will eat later. I have no wish to be watched while I sup.”
He raised a brow at her, but if she recognized the irony of her watching him while he ate, she gave no sign. He sat, and pulled his bowl toward him.
It looked like the same stew of that afternoon, this time with a hunk of brown bread on the side, getting soggy. Thoughts of multiplying bacteria squirmed in his head. He had been taught to eat whatever was put before him, but he didn’t think his mother meant to do so at the risk of his intestinal health. “Er . . . when did you make this stew?”
“Yesterday.”
“Ah. Hmm. Where do you store food, between meals?”
“In a pot, of course.”
“You have no cool place?”
“We have a cellar for roots and apples, cheeses, things like that.”
His eyebrows rose. “ ‘We’?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Milo and I.”
“Milo eats with you?”
“He, ah, stores things here on occasion, and sometimes will eat with me. He prefers his privacy, though. As do I.”
He ignored the comment, suspicions aroused. “And no one else?”
“Who else should there be? No one dares come to Devil’s Mount.”
He stared at her, trying to gain some clue from the shadowed chin and the hands that she held tightly together on the table.
A startling thought hit him. Might she have a boyfriend who even now was somewhere in the castle?
That would explain why she seemed so determined to keep George under lock and key. She might be afraid he would find out and tell the townsfolk. Her days of living in the relative luxury of a castle and romping with her boyfriend would be over.
He wondered who the guy was, and if he might be able to oust him. It wasn’t very sporting of him, but dammit! She was his personification, his anima, not someone else’s!
Oh, Lord. He was losing his mind. He was going to need to see a real shrink by the time he came out of this trance. Now he was imagining rivals to his imaginary lust-object. It said plenty about his repressed sex drive.
There had been a time in his wrestling career when picking up an all-too-eager female groupie while on the road had seemed a good way to spend the night, but Athena’s single motherhood of Gabrielle had been the beginning of the end of such entertainments. He had started to see things from the girl’s point of view, and then all the fun had gone out of it. He had no wish to take advantage of the naïveté of star-blinded young women.
He knew better than to start an affair with one of his female co-workers, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to pay for it from some unfortunate, drug-addicted, virus-carrying prostitute.
Which left him with no choice but to abstain. It had been two years since he had had sex with anything but his hand and some pretty pictures. He could hardly be blamed for the wet dream he was having now.
“There should be no one else,” he said, belatedly answering her question.
He took a bite of the lukewarm stew. It was seasoned with salt and pepper, and with his own appetite, which made the greatest difference of the three. He was used to eating four or five meals a day, and he had been ravenous for hours.
There had been more than one pale face at the windows, and the giggling and footsteps outside his cell this morning had been female, not male. Neither spoke of a male rival lurking in the castle, but rather of something more supernatural.
Ugh. The ghosts of dead virgins.
He shuddered.
There were too many strange things creeping around in his unconscious. He was getting a headache again. Better to think about something constructive.
He downed several more mouthfuls of the stew, which he now noticed had a slightly bitter taste. He stirred his spoon through it, finding bits of what he assumed to be turnip. He had never had turnips before. Perhaps they accounted for the flavor. He swigged some beer.
“Have you made your plan for killing Belch?” his hostess asked.
He sopped up gravy with his bread and wolfed it down. “I have a few ideas. It would help to know what others have tried, before. The de Burroughs and their soldiers must have tried to kill him.”
She shrugged. “Most ran. Whatever stories may say about the bravery of warriors, when faced with such a beast most choose to flee rather than fight. Those that did stay to fight, died.”
“And no one has tried since?”
“One or two. Their bones and mail lie at the bottom of Belch’s pool.”
He scooped up the last of the stew, then set his spoon in the empty bowl. “It’s difficult to believe that the townsfolk of Markesew should go on so long, giving up their young women to the dragon without trying again and again to be rid of it.”
“Yes, it is difficult to believe, isn’t it?” she said, and there was more raw emotion in her voice than he had heard all evening. She was not taunting him now. Her fingertips had gone white where they clenched against the backs of her hands.
“It should be their soldiers going to the lair, not girls,” he said, testing what more of a response he could draw from her.
“They claim to be farmers, not soldiers.” Her tone was bitter.
“Then they should use their gold to hire men to fight Belch, or they could offer a prize to the one who succeeded. I should think there would be many who would work to win it.”
“Ah, but you miss an important point.”
“What is that?”
“A poor girl sacrificed once a year is cheaper than a purse of gold.”
“I can’t believe that an entire town could be so heartless. There must be another reason.”
“Must there? If you think so, then you do indeed come from a land far away. One where no one puts the health of their coffers above a human life.” She stood up. “More stew?”
“I can get it,” he said, moving to stand.
“No, please. Sit.” She took his bowl and went to fill it again, her back to him as she dished from the pot on the edge of the center hearth.
“My land is neither so far nor so distant as that,” he said, thinking about the Missouri boys and their injuries, and the money that wrestling brought in. “But what of their sheep, at least? The farmers must have lost enough of them to equal a large prize.”
“The sheep they send are the poorest of the flocks. There are times I think the farmers and townsfolk see the dragon as a convenient means of being rid of offal, just as one throws unusable scraps to chickens and pigs.”
She brought the bowl back and set it in front of him, and there was such tension in her voice and movements that he thought for a moment she was going to hit him. Instead, she refilled his cup from an earthenware ewer.
He stirred his stew, watching her from the corner of his eye as she again sat across from him. He glanced down into his bowl and noticed some small clumps of white. He mashed them against the edge of the bowl, blending them in. It was probably flour, used to thicken the gravy.
“And what of your own role in this?” he asked, keeping his eyes on his stew, hoping she would answer if she didn’t feel accused. “Why not spirit the girls away, instead of feeding them to Belch? Who would ever know the difference?”
She picked at a hangnail, then started polishing a fingernail with the pad of her thumb. Her tone was less defensive than he had expected. “Belch would know. He would attack the village.”
“Are you so certain he can tell a girl from a sheep, and of the two wouldn’t prefer the sheep to begin with?” He ate some of the stew.
She made a noise suspiciously like a laugh, and almost too quietly for him to hear said, “I once knew someone like that.” She went on in her normal voice, “It was only when Belch ate his first young girl that he stopped his ravaging. Everyone knows that dragons prefer virgins.”
“And gentlemen prefer blondes. But there are always exceptions.”
“Do they?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“Do what?”
“Gentlemen prefer blondes?”
“It’s only a saying.”
The mistress fidgeted and brought her hand up to her hidden mouth in the unmistakeable gesture of someone chewing on a hangnail. “What hair color do you prefer?” she finally asked, around the obstruction.
“Whatever grows naturally upon a woman’s head.”
He might have told the truth and said that he had a fondness for redheads—they made him think of autumn and Irish setters, fires and snuggling naked in a soft blanket in a cabin—but then she would turn out to be blonde or brunette, and she would never forgive him for saying he liked a different color best. He might not know much about women, but he knew that much at least.
“Oh,” she said.
“What about you?” he asked.
Her hands went down to her lap, and she sat still. “I do not think of such things.” “My ass.” “I do not think about that, either!” He laughed at her misinterpretation and its implications. “You’re quick to deny it.”
“Because it is untrue!”
“That’s not the usual reason protests come so fast. I think you do think about my ass,” he teased.
She made a grunt of disbelief, then a puh sound of ejected air. Another grunt, and a hand waved in dismissal. “You speak nonsense.”
“Women look at men’s asses,” he said. “We all know that. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“I do not look at your ass!” “Not even once? Come on. Admit it. I try to look at yours, but you’ve got it too well covered.”
Little choking, gasping sounds came from under her hood. The woman sputtered for a while, then regained the power of speech. “Lecher! To look at a nun’s buttocks! You are no saint!”
“ ‘Ain’t no saint.’ I’ve heard it before.” He grinned.
“I . . . I . . . I hope Belch does eat you!”
“Maybe just a little bite, if you’ll kiss it and make it better.”
She stood up. “I think you should go to your room now.”
“Only if you come with me.”
“Go!” she ordered, sticking her arm out to the side and pointing.
He took another bite of stew. “I’m not done.”
“That is of no matter. Go!”
“Sit down, mistress, please. I’m not a little boy to be sent to bed without finishing his supper.” His intestines made an unhappy gurgle, and what was left of his appetite disappeared. Oh, man, he hoped it hadn’t been a mistake to eat that. “And I’ll stop teasing you, I promise.” At least for now.
Her arm slowly lowered. She remained standing, and he guessed she was considering his size and the impossibility of forcing him to obey her. She was a bossy little thing, and it probably chapped her hide that she couldn’t force her way.
“These failed knights, the one or two who have tried to kill Belch . . .” he said, and pushed away his half-empty bowl. “Do you know anything of how they fought him?”
“Neither lasted more than a minute. They went in, they were eaten. As you will be.”
“Did you watch?”
“I have no stomach for such spectacles, much as you seem to believe otherwise.”
Or maybe she was too young to have been here then. “You were quick enough to drop the sheep down that hatch.”
“Would you rather I had not?”
“Point taken.” He sipped his beer, hoping the alcohol might kill whatever bacteria were multiplying in his gut. “Did you at least hear about how the battles went?”
She moved slowly back to her place at the bench and sat down. “Each had men with him who watched, although they lacked the courage to join their companion. I do not know how true their tellings may be.”
“Tell me what they said. The more I know, the better I can avoid their mistakes.”
“One was killed as he descended the stairs. Belch came out of the water at him, as he did at you today.”
“Was the man making noise like I was?”
“I do not know.”
“Had Belch been fed recently?”
“I do not remember.”
This was not proving helpful.
“What of the second knight?”
“He approached Belch as he lay upon his beach. The dragon did not move, so he stepped closer. And closer.”
“Yes?”
“And closer. Until he was right beside Belch’s head.”
“And?” he asked, leaning closer.
“And SNAP!” She clapped her hands together, making him jump. “Belch ate him.”
“Christ.” He sat back. He was reminded of nature programs, where the crocodile lurks in the muddy water, waiting for the zebra to come close, then lunging up and taking it down in a froth of spraying water.
His bowels gurgled.
The mistress shrugged and dropped her hands back down into her lap. “You are certain you would not rather leave now, with all your parts attached?”
“I can’t. I promised Emoni, and I won’t break that vow.”
“That is admirable of you.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it. Damn that hood! He imagined her at this moment with ash-blond hair and large blue eyes, like a disdainful Michelle Pfeiffer.
He sat and thought for a minute. “I won’t stand much chance against him if I walk right in. He’s too fast.” He thought a little longer. “When does he sleep, do you know?”
“A better question might be when does he wake? And the answer to that is, ‘At the merest sound.’”
“Could I borrow some sleeping potion?” he asked, half joking.
“Mine?” she screeched.
“You have some?” He sat up straighter, excited. “How strong is it? Would it work on Belch?”
“I . . . You don’t . . . You want to drug him?”
“I want to keep my head upon my shoulders, so yes, I want to drug him!”
“Is that not dishonorable?”
“He’s a dragon. I don’t think he cares about honor.”
“But you! How could you kill him while he slept?”
“Much more easily than if he were awake, I’m hoping. The beast has eaten dozens of people—I see no reason to add my name to his list of dining conquests. Hell, yes, I’ll kill him while he sleeps.”
“There is no pride in that. Is that how men fight in your land?”
He thought of the wrestling ring, and the careful manipulation of the crowd’s mood by use of unfair moves and double-crosses. “To be sneaky and underhanded is a virtue, at times. You do have the potion?”
She hesitated. “A powder.”
“Great! Tomorrow I’ll drug him, and then it will be bye-bye, Belch.” His intestines churned, and he suddenly felt a buildup of internal fumes, those of the sort that if let loose would end forever any hope of seducing the woman across the table. “Great! Thank you for supper! I’ll go to bed now!” he said. Then he dashed from the table toward the doorway to the dark corridor.
“You do not want a lamp?” she called after him.
Damn! Of course he needed one if he wanted to find the jakes before he fouled himself. “Yes, yes, if you please.”
He waited in the arched doorway as she moved slowly—oh, so slowly—to light the wick of a small earthenware lamp. Behind him he felt a faint draft of air, and as he turned to look heard a creak of hinges directly across the corridor, then the soft thud of a door coming up against its jamb.
What the hell? That was the door that led into the great hall, the hall which he had not seen. And which should be empty.
She came over and gave him the lamp, the smoke from it reeking of burning tallow. The light was less than that from a match.
“Thank you,” he said, and he would have confronted her about the door to the great hall, only his innards twisted and groaned, and a sweat broke out over his body, accompanied by a roiling sense of nausea.
He made his escape while she might still think him an appealing man.