We marched from Saphar with the Helkent pinnacles black on a tiger’s eye streak of cloud. Torches lit the marketplace tangle of skittish horses, clumsy riders and swearing, laughing grooms, and all Saphar had come to see us off. Hooded market-women jostled lords untimely out of bed, urchins dived among wives anxiously watching their men cling to reins and manes, or counselors disordered by reversing rumps. Sellithar had not come, but a bright yellow square of window marked the queen’s tower, high in the gloomy sky. There were no cheers, no thrown flowers: just a great many quick, quiet embraces, some bleats from the Regent, and a few heartfelt cries of “Luck!”
After things settled, I found myself riding close behind the banner, the trumpeter, the general, and the king. Inyx, top-heavy in mail on a shaggy mountain pony, resembled a bandit off on a raid. Beryx, resplendent with crimson cloak, damascened corselet, and plumed helmet, sat his big brown blood-horse like the pattern of a cavalryman. As the bumping, grumbling, jeering tangle unwound behind us, hide armor bundled on horses’ rumps and sarissas waving all ways to imperil neighbors’ heads, he glanced round and grinned. “Thank the Four,” he remarked, “they’ll be earthborne before we charge.”
It was my first true acquaintance with flesh and blood warriors. They may be gallant and lordly in combat, but beforehand they grumble, quarrel, get drunk, lose their gear, their money, their horses and themselves, make lewd jests, sing lewder songs, and need more shepherding than all Quarred’s flocks. Nor do they relish civilian company.
At first the horses kept them humble, but the second night Beryx and Inyx took me along with trumpeter, banner, and armor-bearers when, as usual, they joined the circle at the nearest fire. Beryx too had noted some surly looks. The moment we settled, he called across, “Harran, will you give us a song?”
Soldiers have their own bards: they have poets as well. Some of this doggerel had been running in my head, mixed with the rhythms of our going, the broken clop and crunch of hooves, the jingle of scabbard and bridle, the gusts of talk, the heavy flap-flap of the long green banner on its haft. I patterned the rhythms and married in the rhymes, adding a few of my own. What emerged was a marching song, scurrilous as always, deriding everything from the dragon, “that flame-throwing lizard,” to the king’s helmet plume, “tall enough to tickle the dragon’s—”
I had begun in dour silence. I progressed in stunned quiet that broke in a roar of delight. A little unsure how Beryx would take it, I glanced across, and he shook his fist at me, laughing with the rest. Then a huge Gebrian’s friendly pat almost snapped my collarbone, his neighbor soused me with a battered tin bucket of wine, and next day I had to ride with the first squadron, who all wanted to sing, but could not quite recollect the chorus of my song.
* * * * *
All those days are merry, when I look back. We were on the road, an enlargement in itself: riding in the effervescent spring weather, and it was fine. Meeting a new challenge, and in my case, finding a new fellowship. And crossing the uplands of Saphar Resh, Everran’s heart, with its trim whitewashed villages, its endless rolling green vines, its cultivated trees at every well and roadside, its cheerful, prosperous people to feed and stable and wish us on our way.
Beryx too was merry. He had become a soldier, no more than first among equals, and he had the soldier’s gift of living now, shutting out before and behind. Often he made me think of the boy who shipped with the whalers those fifteen years ago—until the mirror signal came.
We were nearing the rust-red, deep-cloven uplands of Raskelf, where the Kelf river springs and Quarred summers its flocks. Against the Helkents’ embery flanks the signal made a white stutter of light in the early dawn, bringing the column to an instant spontaneous halt. Inyx leapt from his pony, whipped round his little polished cavalry shield, and flashed an acknowledgement. Around me men leant forward: many of the phalanx veterans could read mirror signals too.
“Findtar...” someone muttered at my shoulder, “. . . burnt. Oof! Garrison... east. Evacuation... what in the Four is—?”
“Dislocated,” rapped another voice. “Sarras—” “He runs Gesarre—” “... fallen back on Kelflase. Fire reported—to his... south!”
“Four!—” “Shut up!—” “Scouts lost... delayed... last report—”
“Smoke in the... Perfumed Vale. Finish. Luck.”
In the deep dull hush, someone else muttered, “Thanks.”
Beryx had been sitting utterly still, a carven cavalryman on a carven horse. Now he turned his head. He and Inyx exchanged a half-dozen staccato sentences and he wheeled his horse. The merriment was gone. His face was as honed and planed as a sword bared for the thrust.
“Forced march.” His voice matched his face. “Squadrons close up. At the trot.” And swinging his mount from the paven roadway, he jumped the ditch and headed in a bee-line for the north-east.
“Ain’t the pace—worries me,” panted a tall Stiriann, as we towed our grunting horses over yet another limestone scarp. “Beryx always—gets along. It’s these four-footed bladder-bags—we gotta tow behind. Here, harper. Give’s its head. Now belt it, Asc!”
My horse came up with a bound, my Gebrian acquaintance lumbered after it, and we slid slantwise down a scree fit to capsize goats. In the ravine bottom, the banner-bearer was girth-deep in stones and foam. On the further brink Inyx’s pony reappeared, black with sweat but tossing its head in a clear question, What’s keeping you? As Beryx put his horse to the climb, I could not help asking, “Surely the road would have been quicker?” which brought a snort from Asc.
“General’s playing scout. We’ll be headed for the Perfumed Vale quick as morvallin fly.”
We ate noonday bread and cheese on the march, watered in mid-afternoon at a river Asc called the Velketh, and bivouacked on the northern side of a valley paved with the world’s hardest stones, amid the glorious confusion of our first picket lines. I was almost too weary to walk. Beryx was everywhere: adjusting hobbles, hammering halter stakes, checking head-ropes, hooves, and backs, all with a crisp urgency worlds from his former merriment. The men did not seem to mind. They leapt to obey his orders. They even leapt with alacrity when the trumpet sounded before Valinhynga brought up the dawn.
That day was easier, since instead of running athwart the Raskelf we angled down the Pirvel valley’s wooded river-flats, often moving at the trot. “Four send we find this lizard,” growled Asc, rubbing his backside as we walked at noon, “before my rump wears out.” The horses, hard-ridden by inexperienced men, were white with salt and beginning to flag, yet Beryx still pressed the pace. Errith the Stiriann, also unconcerned, predicted, “Drop these clumpers soon.”
The valley widened, a long vista of a green and silver-gray north, with Kelflase somewhere in its folds, but our mirror signals brought no response. Then the slopes of Saeverran Slief began to rise on our left, pale blonde upland grasses that the Stirianns named with nostalgia as they bumped: but that too was devoid of life. In mid-afternoon we struck the Saeverran road. As we swung onto its deeply rutted wagon tracks, Beryx reined up.
“General!” he called. “Do you smell smoke?”
A hundred yards in front, Inyx wheeled his horse. I heard his wide-nostrilled Snff! And as the weary column slowed, a northern air drew it over us: a vile, choking waft of charred thatch, smoldering timber, carrion, and half-burnt flesh.
Inyx looked at the king. “Ah,” he said.
Beryx glanced round. Behind the helmet nasal his brows almost met. “Volunteers?” he said. “Scout?”
The first squadron’s surge carried along my horse. Beryx said swiftly, “Asc, you’ve a good eye, Errith, Iphas, Thrim—Harran?”
“When my horse volunteers, lord,” I said, “I can hardly retreat.”
Asc and Errith laughed. Beryx gave me one glance cut razor-edged down between mirth and irritation and said, “Go on.”
Berating my idiocy, I walked my horse forward with the rest. We could all see the smoke now. It was rising from just over the ridge, a thin, languid coil of black upon seraphic horizon sky.
The soldiers fanned out. Asc growled, “Come behind me, harper. Cover you with this bladder-bag,” and brought his sarissa to the port. Errith rose in his stirrups. Over Asc’s massive shoulder I saw a winged black cloud whirl up, heard a raucous, indignant yark, and then Thrim’s growl in his throat. “Morvallin. The black sods.”
It was an ordinary upland farm: a stone-gabled house, byres and barns forming three sides of a square whose fourth side opened to the road. Something had struck the house—
No. “Struck,” is not the word. From central door to gable, the wall was gone. The king-beam had snapped. The gable itself was a heap of tumbled stone. A fire had been burning inside. Wisps of smoke still rose amid the blackened remnants of wall-timber, furniture, family possessions, and charred stems of fallen thatch.
“Ah,” said Asc, deep in his throat. He checked his horse, and sat looking round in the eerie, unnatural quiet.
The white-washed barn door was open, an ox-cart propped in a corner of the yard. Trampled flesh-red soil brought up the gray-green foliage of helliens rustling beyond the house. At the yard’s center was a cattle trough, a hollowed tree-trunk that held a glitter of white. Beyond lay a bundle of discarded sacks. They were red-stained. A white bone was sticking out...
“Best get off, harper.” Errith gripped my arm without looking round. “Don’t mind us. First time, most throw up.”
As I straightened, he spoke to Asc. “Feeding cattle. That’s salt.”
“Ah,” Asc repeated, that subterranean rumble quite expressionless.
Thrim put in, “Cattle rushed. See t’fence?” It was a post and rail: two posts leant drunkenly, rails hanging from their mortises in splintered stubs. “Went out there.”
All the heads turned, in that slow, hair-trigger scrutiny, to the slope behind the barn.
The cattle had run uphill, scattering as they went. The first was a young red heifer. On her back, all four legs straight up, belly torn open from udder to dewlap, intestines strewn around. Asc spat with a disgusted hawk. Next was a calf. Its head had been torn off. Then a cow, ribs stove into the bloated trunk. The next was a bull.
“Four,” said Errith under his breath. He had no need to finish, we were all thinking it: what sort of claw can rip out ribs and gouge the spine from a full-grown bull as a falcon does with a mouse?
“Best go back,” Thrim said in that wooden voice. The horses were snorting, beginning to crouch and sidle; soon they would be out of hand.
“Ah,” said Asc again, eyes on the slope.
Silently we looked with him at a thirty-foot black swathe of grass burnt off at the roots. Then with a speed that nearly shot my heart through my teeth, he swung off and thrust his reins at Iphas. “Hold that.”
No one spoke as he came back. He was walking slowly, head bowed, cradling his burden with incongruous tenderness for such a big, burly man. “Back,” he said, walking past without a look at us. “Report.”
“Playing up hill, I reckon,” Errith commented in that empty, controlled tone, as Asc delicately, tenderly, laid her in the road before the king. She could not have been ten, and she had been pretty, once. The slender sun-browned arms, the wisps of silky blonde child’s hair, and the long fine legs were pretty still.
“Day... Day and a half.” Asc, too, used that flat, empty speech. “House smashed. Farmer dead in yard. Cattle killed. But only morvallin’ve touched. Didn’t feed.” A thread of deep, savage hatred entered his voice. “Sheer—wantonness.”
Beryx was looking at the child. I saw his nostril-rims turn white and his jaw muscles bunch and heard that furious, protective cry in the presence room. “That is my land! My charge and trust!” But his voice was empty too.
“Inyx, fall out the column. Set outposts. You men, come with me. Bury her, Asc.”
We rode away in that same unnatural quiet which had lapped the farm and, looking at the men around me, I saw that red-hot, protector’s vengefulness in every face.
* * * * *
We struck up over the Slief, far north of Saeverran town, riding in a fringe of scouts and presently, into a sunset that was a silent hymn to Fire. On our right, the slopes from the distant Helkents were a tide-race of fiery gloom and bloodily glowing crests, on our left the Slief climbed in sheets of scarlet and deepest crimson to a cloudless, wine-flushed sky. But in the north the light rose vertically up an enormous cloud bank whose buttresses of molten copper and alexandrite thrust out between rose-black canyons, burning without combustion in the vacant air. A little warm wet wind arose: a northerly. I sniffed the stink of foul conflagrations, but also the tickle of rain on dried-out earth.
Asc grunted. Thrim said, “Just so it wets that sod as well.”
* * * * *
Around the fires they regained some spirit, but now there was real malice in the boasts and savagery in the jests, and the dragon was the only butt. Presently rose a cry of, “Harper! Where’s harper? C’mon, harper, give us a song.” Rubbing his calves, Errith added, “Take m’mind off these galls.”
My own choice was for something gentle, to erase those still-too-present memories. But a harper must know listeners as well as lore, and escape was clearly the last thing in their heads. Moreover, Beryx would not have thanked me for sapping their courage if it were.
In the end I dredged up a thing I dislike and seldom sing, an ancient vendetta chant of Meldene: a tribesman hunting human blood. It brought a hot, eager roar. As Beryx rose, sounding the unofficial turn-in, Asc rumbled, “Come’n check cloppers, harper. You’ve done me a power of good.”
We lurched off amid the manure piles and hidden stakes and horses luckily too tired to play the fool. A stumble and a clipped, “Uh!” announced Inyx on the same errand, and by common consent we paused at the line end, staring into the starless north.
Asc sniffed. Inyx said, “Ah.”
Asc said, “Reckon it’s there?” And Inyx growled in his throat.
“Scouting. Flew a circle round Kelflase and back. It’s there.”
Asc’s deep voice was musing when he spoke again. “Ever see the Perfumed Vale, harper?”
“I have heard the songs,” I said.
“Ah.” More silence. Then, “I don’t have the words. But I reckon songs’d miss the gold, for that.”
He paused. We moved to turn away. And then all three of us froze in our tracks.
A sound was drifting out of the north: tenuous, bodiless, the very emanation of night. It began on a high note, a thin, tremulous wail, wavered, rose to an eldritch howl, hung at its climax till my teeth hurt. Dropped, ending as if slashed. Inyx exclaimed, quick and incoherent, under his breath. I felt the hair rise on my scalp.
It came again, a chorus this time: a quavering, soprano cadenza, a choir’s mourning voice. But from no human throat.
The fires’ comfortable hubbub was dead. The silence was complete. The very horses must have been holding their breaths.
Once more that shrill, eerie keening wavered up into the dark: trembled, faded, died to a dissonant finale, and was lost. Then the night pressed down on us until I felt myself suffocating. I let out my breath.
Asc backed straight into me like a panicky horse. I never thought such a man could so disintegrate. “Not me,” he was moaning, “I didn’t, I never meant, I’m not ready to—” And, as if ungagged, Inyx snarled, “Shut up!”
“Si’sta,” he went on fiercely; he must have been shaken too. I had never before heard him lapse into dialect. “Si’sta, this is Stiriand. And th’art a Gebrian, tha great stupid lump!”
Asc was still quaking. I managed to say, “What was it... anyway?”
“Ulfann,” answered a quiet, cool voice in the dark. “A big pack, by the sound.” And the night was only darkness, the ghosts’ sobbing the call of feral dogs. “Don’t worry, Asc.” For a moment the coolness held contained, deadly rage. “If they’re hunting anything, it’ll be the dragon’s scraps.”
Inyx came in at once, in something very like relief. “Horse here you should see. Staked in the coronet.”
The king moved away. I heard that steely reassurance applied at another fire. Asc did not move. When I thought he could take it, I murmured, “What did you think it was?”
He did not answer for a long time. When he spoke, the abruptness said his courage had not yet healed. He said, “Lossian’s hounds.”
“Oh.” There are scores of songs, reserved for the evening’s end, about the Stiriann Hunter and his bloodless pack that course men’s souls. They say that a Stiriann who hears them calling is doomed to join their quarry before the next new moon.
“But,” I tried to steady him, “the general was right. You’re from Gebria. They hunt Stirianns.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Why should they call for you before—anyone else?”
Asc turned away, bringing his face to the distant firelight. It was calm now, composure regained. A man looking open-eyed upon his fate.
“Not me,” he said very quietly. “All of us.”
* * * * *
We saddled up in a drizzle coming down in slow gray showers from the north, dulling the Slief, shining thinly on horse-rumps and helmets, oiling sarissa blades, blanching everything. Only Beryx’s green eyes seemed to brighten in that pallid light. When I rode up to the banner, they shone beneath his sodden plume, and he gave me a hunter’s smile. “Just,” he said, shaking off a shower of raindrops, “what we want.”
The rain shortened horizons. The sky was low too, hiding any trace of smoke or change in light. Almost without warning, the Slief ended and we were on the brink of a precipice, with the Perfumed Vale at our feet.
Deve Astar is a gorge, little longer than a mile, where the Kelf drops from the uplands into Gebria’s arid plains and flows to join the manifold channels of Kemreswash, thence to vanish in the insatiable Hethrian sands. The water comes down in a cascade famed for its roof of rainbows and the dazzling white of its froth against the luxuriant greens below, a vision to match the beauty of Deve Astar’s air, an invisible paradise.
The forest is artificial, lovingly planted and tended, with every scented tree in Everran among its stock. The topmost terraces bear flowering helliens, with white, orange, scarlet, and magenta blossoms whose honey inebriates birds. Next come the keerphars, orchid-shaped pink and purple blossoms whose dry, delicate perfume enhances the helliens’ sweet. Below are twisted rust-red yeltaths, shrubby cennaphars, and norgals whose long green leaves droop about papery white trunks, all mingling honey scents with the torch-pines’ aromatic white flowers. At the waterside, the sellothahr’s snow-white, gold-hearted blossoms spread their spring morning smell, and along the gorge flanks stand acre upon acre of rivannons whose fragile brown and yellow sprays breathe an incense to ravish Air himself.
Tucked in coigns of the terraces lie foresters’ huts and perfumeries, innumerable beehives, and cabins for travelers who come from as far as Estar, less to see than to breathe. The most famous song of the great harper Norhis calls Deve Astar a giant agate: outside are the rust-and-honey bands of the cliffs, then the forest’s variegated greens, deepening to the seam of marble-white froth at the gorge’s heart.
A shower was passing as we reached the crest. The distant rumor of the cascade, a breath of diluted perfume, floated up. Slowly the farther scarp emerged, glistening sleekly, bay and russet from the wet. Then the rain’s wings lifted from the Vale beneath.
Inyx stiffened as if struck. Errith let out a winded grunt. Thrim’s was more like a moan. I heard it travel down the column behind us as one by one they reached the prospect of the brink.
Almost from our feet a lane of felled trunks and broken limbs and dying leaves ran away downhill, scored clean across the vale as if some brutal engineer had been clearing a road. The river was choked: as the cascade poured down, heedless, insentient, the water had backed up to inundate the vale below. We could see its cold, turbid glint up where no water should be, but downstream from the dam was worse.
Fire had been kindled there. It had been lashed across the forest like a whip, and the trees had burnt behind it, for most of our scented trees are rich in oil. Huge, charred weals ran hither and thither, with pitiful half-stripped skeletons upright in their desolation, some still smoking, some with a few rags of brown leaf or a couple of heart-breaking withered flowers. The helliens had suffered worst: along the upper terraces the fire had run from treetop to treetop, leaving unbroken courses of destruction: leafless, black. But burning helliens had fallen down upon the keerphars, and the keerphars had collapsed onto the norgals, whose papery bark had fired like candles, spreading the blaze to the yeltaths and the ardent cennaphars, thence to the rivannons, which had disintegrated upon the sappy sellothahr, breaking what would not burn. The subtle spectrum of greens, the soft flower tapestry, was all gone.
A wind moved, and a sickening stink enveloped us: perfumes corroded by the reek of green burning wood and oil-bearing leaves, and the fetor of that burning untimely quenched.
I found my vision had blurred. My throat was thick with tears. I too had cherished the Perfumed Vale, if only in others’ songs. One day, I had promised myself, I would come there and make a song of my own. When I was at the height of my powers.
When my hearing returned, men were swearing and mourning all round me. Not loudly, but with the anguish of a hurt too deep for noise. Then, as the first brunt of the blow passed, it became fuel for rage. Everywhere they gathered their reins, clenched their sarissa butts, and looked toward the king.
So far as I remember, Beryx had not made a sound. I do not think he so much as clenched a fist. He was sitting quite motionless. Except that his head was turning, a slight, deadly movement, as his eyes quartered the vale. This, I remember thinking, is a king. No raving, no lamentation: all feeling kept to power the revenge.
Then he turned his head.
His eyes were quite black. The pupils must have dilated until the irises completely vanished, and as he looked at me I covered my own eyes, for that blackness was more blinding than the sun.
When my sight cleared, he was speaking to Inyx, in a soft, impersonal, terrifying voice I had never heard before.
“There is nothing to eat. Nowhere to lair. It will not have stayed. How far to Astarien?” Inyx, looking almost scared, jerked his chin upstream and muttered, “Ten miles.” Pulling his horse round, Beryx said with the same glacial ferocity, “Come on, then, you clodhoppers. Ride.”
The way to Astarien is mostly footpaths, which was fortunate for the horses, for otherwise Beryx would have foundered them. As it was, we slid and swore and skidded along in peril of our necks, with the king up and down the column like quicksilver: saying little, but making that little cut deep as a knife.
Around noon we toiled up a last ridge, and cross-wise beneath us opened a wide valley whose mouth was shut by the thick green band of timber along the Kelf. Stands of silver-gray tarsal and black-barked elonds scattered the valley undulations, folding up to a silver bezel set above a gray ring-wall. Astarien’s lookout tower.
Beryx let out his breath. Inyx let out a grunt.
The valley was thick with trails of ants. From all ways they converged upon Astarien, gray, brown, and colored ants, with the blobs of cattle, horses, oxcarts, and every other sort of conveyance from palanquins to wheelbarrows in their midst. Inyx said tersely, “Evacuation. Town’ll be out of its head.” Beryx retorted, “There’s a governor,” and started his horse.
But half a mile from the town he too was riding at a walk, and on the rise to the gates he had to admit defeat. “Inyx!” he bellowed above the bawling, yelling, squawking, and yammering as a mob of cattle engulfed us, inextricably tangled with a flock of irate geese. “Halt—column!” He raised his voice a notch. “First pentarchy... follow me!”
Astarien was worse. The gates were jammed with stray stock and fugitives’ paraphernalia, while citizens, refugees, and a frantic garrison churned wildly through the streets, and when Asc and Errith literally fought our way into the governor’s residence, we found a plump bald provincial on the brink of lunacy.
“No-no-no!” he shrieked as Beryx knocked the door open upon a snowstorm of papers and hysterical suppliants. “No more! Throw them out!” And wheeling to repel the door guard, I was struck dumb to find the king consumed with mirth.
“Really, Gerrar!” his clear voice cut the racket, crisp, winged with authority, intensely amused. “Including me?”
Gerrar gaped. Then he gasped, gulped, and nearly burst into tears. Beryx held up an embrace aimed somewhere about his knees.
“I never thought,” he remarked as Gerrar subsided, “when I ordered an evacuation, that it would prove quite so... turbulent.”
Gerrar clawed the air for words. “Lord, lord, if you only knew—seven days it’s gone on and nowhere to put them and we can’t raise Kelflase and Sarras said the dragon was headed here and I’ve nothing to fight it with and—I can’t stop them, I can’t house them, I can’t even feed them and now the dragon’s in my Resh and—and—and I don’t know what to do!”
“First, sit down.” Beryx backed him to a chair. “Then forget the refugees. Then think about the dragon. Is it this side the Kelf?”
Flopping into the chair, Gerrar mopped at his brow, and presently assembled a reply.
“Last word was this morning. Coed Wrock . Saw the neighbor’s steading burn and ran for their lives. Coed Wrock—” his face knotted with the struggle to recall knowledge basic as his name. “Coed Wrock is... just across the Kelf.”
“Good.” Astounded, I saw Beryx was smiling again: a blade-like smile worlds away from mirth. As Gerrar’s jaw dropped, he put a hand on the plump shoulder. “Now forget the dragon too. Just think of someone smart enough to take the king’s authority and picket three hundred horses. And then tell me his name.”
It proved to be the garrison lieutenant. He had no fresh news, but once extricated and undistracted he collared some farmers and fairly ran them out to the task. As we rode up to our beleaguered column, Beryx gave a little sigh, and there was a kind of gaiety in his eyes.
“Right, lads!” he called, shouldering past a wheelbarrow load of fowls and two collided ox-carts. “You can get dressed. We’re off!”
* * * * *
The men marched in a mood wild as Beryx’s. As they forged through the refugees still clogging our track there were extravagant jests at escape from the horses, extravagant grumbles at the bull-hide armor’s weight, extravagant boasts of the dragon’s doom. Beryx made them soak each other in the Kelf’s shallow fords, which doubled the complaints. Then he formed them in a hollow square with archers and banner in the midst, and after that, to me, the jests rang jarringly false. For as he called the Advance, I saw the high tawny skyline of Astarien’s Slief was limned not against gray rain clouds, but on a bleak blue sky rimed with smoke.
I reassessed the men around me. They moved solidly, ponderously, thick bone and muscle cased in each sodden carapace, the sarissas swinging with the even ripple of a long distance march, yet now I could read the tension in each familiar face. Perhaps, I thought, the joking was a thing they could not help.
Beryx alone had retained his horse. Presently he called back, “Harran! Why don’t you help these clumpers along?”
So it was the rhythm of an old marching song, older perhaps than Berrian, which swung us up the rutted track to the water-blackened, dust-yellow rock divide that names Coed Wrock. Watershed Farm. And it was upon that rhythm that we topped the crest, and a wide bowl of devastation opened beneath us about two fountains of strong black smoke.
Beryx called the Halt. Inyx went forward to his horse. I heard scraps of talk. “New smoke”... “must be here”... “Where is it, then?”
The valley was wide, strewn with outcrops of house-sized granite boulders, scattered with thick stands of whippy upland norgal and writhen black ensal trees among acres and acres of scorched, smoldering grass. In all that desolation only the smoke and a black cloud of morvallin moved.
Inyx was still talking. Beryx shrugged. Inyx’s voice rose. “. . . daft, I tell you—dismount them and not yourself! For the Lords’ love—” Beryx’s jerk of the chin superseded words.
He came riding back, calm now, but with a mad, dancing brightness in his eye. “Ready, lads?” Perfect confidence in the smile. “Harper, take cover here. You can’t ‘appraise the men of valor’ with their sarissa butts knocking you in the teeth.”
I opened my mouth, but he had already looked away. It was a command, not open to dispute.
The ranks parted for me. Iphas gave me a tight grin. Thrim said, “Keep t’head down, harper.” Asc gripped my arm and said nothing at all.
The Advance was passed. The square began to move. I sat up on a rock and watched, defiant, desolate. They reached the burnt ground. Black ash puffed up, I caught the muffled thump of boots, a cough, squeak of wet hide, clink of belts. Then, high, clear, merrily taunting, the trumpet sounded. Not a war-call. Beryx had offered the ultimate impudence: it was the hunter’s View Halloo.
I waited, feeling my stomach squirm. The square was well distant now, on an open slope down to the gullies that veined the valley center, swaying and twisting as they held rank over the broken ground. Glaring round, I thought, almost desperately, Damn you, come out.
The ridge-top beyond me moved. Ten or twelve boulders shifted like a waking snake. A knoll rippled, surged, became a crest of tree-length spines, a spur toppled into a fore-arm, a shoulder, a foot the size of a horse’s trunk, with nails and spurs longer than scythes. Then the whole rock line beyond left the ground and swung slowly, drowsily, sideways in midair. Hawge had lifted its head.
Out in the valley came the small urgent ring of commands. The square stopped, shifting as the ranks faced outward on each side. The front line knelt, and the men behind them planted sarissa butts in the ground. It was a hedgehog, crouched for offensive defense.
Languidly, Hawge lumbered afoot. Its back was to me, so I saw the scorpion sting on the dragging tail. The legs sprang lizard-like up from below the trunk and angled down again to the foot, which moved clumsily, hampered by its frightful claws, but the thighs were huge as trees. The back curved up under its crest of spines, as yet lying half erect, dipped to the serpentine neck, and rose again to the head. I still see that in my dreams.
I suppose it most resembled a gigantic earless, hairless horse. The nostrils were monstrously oversized, and the orbital bones exaggerated so the eyes bulged out far beyond the head: pupilless eyes, multi-facetted, twirling like a fly’s. What struck me hardest was their color. Because like Beryx’s, they were green.
It took a step, and the membranous wings rattled on its sides. It was mailed, as the lore says, iridescent black, gold, silver when it moved, glinting on its lean greyhound flanks. The tail twitched. Then, slothfully, with a volcano’s insolence, it yawned.
The jaws seemed to open forever, clean back to the eyes, the lower one pointed and reptilian, both snagged with curving white fangs, clear against black stains on the serrated canine lips, the immense red tongue, and the gullet like a well. It sighed: a forge-like roar. A small jet of fire shot from its nostrils, and I caught the opened-grave stench of its breath.
It seemed half-minded to lie down again, for the head swayed, low to the ground. The eyes revolved torpidly, a green corpse-light against the leathery skull. Then the trumpet rang again.
Hawge sighed in answer, unfurled its wings, black leather mainsails, and leapt up into the air.
The image of those massive flanks and shoulders’ wave-like ripple blinded me. I next saw it circling the valley, flying with a vulture’s labored indolence, twirling its eyes to study the men below.
Whatever Beryx said, the words were inaudible. The huge burst of laughter which followed them was clear enough, and enough, it seemed, to pierce a dragon’s hide. Hawge dropped from its patrol and angled in at them, the mighty wings rowing lazily, the head almost skimming the ground.
Nor did I know Beryx’s battle plan. I merely saw the sarissas on that side swing apart, heard Inyx’s whiplash, “Fire!” and Beryx yelling above him, “Take its eyes!”
A flight of arrows flashed up and over with a second flight so close that it looked continuous. They were the Tiriann clothyard shafts that can pierce a shield and go on to kill an armored man, and for all its armed and armored might Hawge lifted over the square like a huge black morval that has mistaken its prey. A yell of, “Everran!” followed it from three hundred throats.
The dragon snorted in reply. Fire shot out ahead and wreathed back along it sides. It flicked over on a wing, turned in its length with a breath-stopping agility, and this time there was no indolence in its flight.
Inyx bellowed again. The sarissa points swung out and down as they do for the charge, and the ranks braced their shoulders for the shock.
Hawge leveled out with tail brushing the ground. Just beyond spear length it reared up as a fighting cock does to use its spurs, beat the huge wings once to give the blow full impulse, and flung itself upon the spears.
Sarissas broke like sticks, men tumbled head over heels, the square side collapsed like a broken dam. But with a scream of pain and wrath that nearly burst my eardrums, Hawge hurtled past the banner and sought refuge in the higher air.
I vaguely recall them pulling each other upright, grabbing for weapons, laughing as they scrambled back into line amid Inyx’s brazen roars. I was myself leaping up and down in a manner most unbardlike, yelling taunts to the dragon that now circled fast and furiously, spouting fire as it stoked its rage. Great gouts of flame hung like lurid puffballs in the sky. Beryx was yelling as ferociously as Hawge had, while his horse plunged and gyrated, utterly terrified.
The square had barely reformed when Hawge banked, folded its wings, and catapulted into a dive. It plummeted down like a monstrous misshapen falcon stooping straight on the square’s center and so fast I thought it would break its own neck as well as theirs.
The sarissas shot up. I looked to see them all crushed bodily, no steel sting could repulse such a charge. Then the wings backed with a slam like thunder; the dragon braked impossibly and unleashed a spout of fire just above their heads.
The square vanished in foul black smoke, the dragon roared like a furnace and shot by just above it, the tall green banner toppled, I heard shouts, screams, Inyx and Beryx roaring through the din. The dragon doubled up, leant in on a wing, and spouted again.
The uproar crescendoed. Easily now, the dragon lifted away.
The smoke convulsed and battered itself. Then, from its depths emerged, not scattered, broken fugitives, but a bank of haphazardly pointing spears.
Slowly the square coalesced beneath. The men staggered, some supporting others, coughed, choked, swiped at their eyes. Their bull-hide armor steamed like kettles and they beat their arms frantically to and fro. The sarissa ranks were ragged, the lines worse than doglegs: but they were intact. Even as I looked, a sooty green rag jerked upward in their midst.
Hawge’s scream could have pulverized rocks. The square dressed ranks with frantic fumbling haste while the dragon whipped round and round overhead, re-stoking its fire. Beryx wrestled his maddened horse. Inyx was still roaring, hoarse with smoke. As the dragon turned over into its next dive, the sarissas opened and a flight of arrows met it high above fire-range.
Hawge swerved in mid-plummet, screamed with rage, and tore up into the higher air.
The square swayed as men propped themselves on others’ shoulders. Some were running back into the smoke, retrieving sarissas, tearing home as the dragon dropped once more.
This time the arrows did not deter it. Three times it scourged them with flame, and three times the square sustained it, emerging disordered and distressed but unbroken beyond the smoke. But the sarissas were thinner, broken or burnt, and as the square moved, many wounded or disarmed men were helped along in its midst. I was hoarse with futile shouting, and my stomach had grown cold. How long before they faced the dragon, weaponless?
Once more Hawge dropped in that catapulting dive. This time the sarissas stayed upright, but a shining hail shot up from their midst full in the dragon’s face.
In the midst of the volley Hawge twisted and shot out its wings. One got out of time. Beat wildly, un-coordinated. Seemed to crumple. Its own momentum slid Hawge sidelong down the sky as it made a desperate recover, lost it. And hit with a thump that shook the earth, amid a barbaric yell of triumph from three hundred smoke-parched throats.
Very clearly, in the comparative lull as the dragon floundered, I heard Beryx’s order. “Present—sarissas. Charge.”
The front rank sarissas came to the horizontal. The square moved.
A phalanx charge is not the cavalry’s delirious thunderbolt. It is delivered at a walk, measured, deliberate, and irresistible as death itself. I could picture my friends’ faces: Iphas, Errith, Thrim, Asc, all cold with vengeance about to be assuaged.
Hawge had blundered to its feet. It waddled a few steps, clumsy as a grounded albatross, looking over its shoulder as it went. The square came on. Hawge’s eyes revolved. Its head snaked along the ground. Then it turned and began lumbering forward too.
Fifty yards. Forty. I could hear Inyx calling them off, steady as if on parade. My fingernails had pierced my palms. Thirty. My throat ached with the expectation of fire. Hawge was breathing it, short pants, oily black smoke shooting above its head. Twenty yards. Inyx yelled, “Go!” And as the ranks broke into a trot to gain momentum the dragon swung its tail.
I think—I hope—most of the front rank died instantly. They were my friends. The tail mowed the entire rank down, smashing them into the ground, hurling them in the air like toys, crushing rib-cages and pelvises inside the bull-hides that could foil fire but not such giant blows. The second rank, trapped in the charge, fell over the bodies with sarissas going all ways as they tripped, the square sides spilt helplessly outward round the fallen, and with a tremendous brazen bellow Hawge lashed fire into the chaos and followed it in with sting and tooth and nail.
I cannot describe the rest: it is blotted by smoke and tears. I remember stray sarissas beating in the murk, the dragon’s back that surfaced like a spiny whale, geysers of red-hearted black dust. A sweep of the tail flinging two bodies thirty feet into the air, the flash of steel as someone, in gallant despair, tackled it with a sword. A running archer caught by a fire-blast and turned to a falling meteor. A monstrous claw coming out of the smoke to dig in and twist as the dragon pivoted, and blood spouting from a body—dead, I pray—under the nails. The hideous, hideous noise.
And Beryx, with a sarissa for lance and his cloak over his horse’s eyes, hurling them both at the dragon like some mortally wounded, pain-demented boar.
The sarissa pierced Hawge. I saw its head go in, somewhere at the root of a wing. The dragon let out a screech that muted all the others and whipped its head about on a gout of flame, the horse screamed as horribly as only horses can and tried to rear over backward with its front legs seared completely away, the dragon’s tail caught it in mid-fall and hurled them both skyward like scarecrows, whiplashing to catch Beryx as he came down and hurl him away again like a catapulted stone. Then the smoke veiled it all.