Dragonslayer's Return

"I told you we should have come here later in the summer," Diane complained halfheartedly. She brushed back her dirty blonde hair - which was shorter now, for she had gotten info one of her I-need-a-change moods and cropped it tight about her ears, leaving the front longer than the sides and back, as was the fashion - and blew a raindrop off the end of her nose.



"It'll be raining in the summer, too," Gary assured her. "This is England. It always rains in England." Diane could hardly disagree. They had been in London for three days and had actually seen the sun on several different occasions. The brightness had been fleeting, though. Always another dark cloud rolled in from one horizon or the other, pelting them with a cold spring rain.



What made it worse was that Gary insisted that they always be outside. Diane could think of a hundred places to visit in London, most of them indoors, but Gary was too restless for such orderly sightseeing. He wanted to walk London's streets, and walk they did - to the palace, to the tower, to Big Ben and Parliament and Westminster Abbey. But even in Westminster Abbey, where one could spend an entire day just reading the tomb markers of the famous dead, Gary had been restless. They had spent no more than an hour inside, rushing over Charles Darwin's floor stone, sliding past the great ornate caskets of the kings and queens, of Elizabeth and Mary, ironically buried side by side, romping through Poet's Corner, where lay Geoffrey Chaucer and the Brontes, and a score of other writers whose works Diane and Gary had grown up with and come to love.



Diane could have spent the entire day and the day after that just sitting in Poet's Corner, thinking of those books and those writers, feeling their ghosts hovering about her and taking comfort in the perpetuity of the human condition.



So why were they outside and walking along the wet streets again? she wondered. And in a completely different section of London? Diane sighed and looked about, watched a black cab zip past at about fifty miles an hour on the wrong side of the street. To her right was a large brownstone building, another of London's many museums, she figured -  not that she'd get to spend any time inside one!



Gary plodded along a few steps ahead of her, and Diane had the distinct impression (and not for the first time!) that he hardly noticed that she was even there. More than once in the last three days, Diane had wondered why Gary had asked her to come along, and why he had picked London for their yearly vacation. The thought of taking separate trips, something the young woman would never have dreamed of before, was beginning to sound appealing.



"What is it?" she asked, somewhat impatiently, when she caught up to Gary. He was standing in the middle of the uneven sidewalk, staring down at a small crater in the stone.



Gary pointed to the mark.



"So?"



"It's not new," Gary remarked. He bent down and ran his fingers around the smoothed edges of the hole. "This happened a long time ago."



"So?" Now Diane's tone showed that she was clearly growing flustered. "It's a hole in the sidewalk, Gary. It's a stupid hole in a stupid sidewalk, a hole that's filling up with rainwater."



Gary looked up at her, and the pained expression on his face, as though she had just insulted him profoundly, stole some of the drenched woman's ire.



"What do you think made this?" he asked.



"What do you think?" she echoed, not really in the mood for such games.



"A V-1 rocket?" Gary asked more than stated. A wistful smile came over his face. "It was, you know," he added. "Or some other German bomb from World War II."



"Am I supposed to feel guilty?" Diane asked sarcastically, wondering if Gary was snidely referring to her German heritage.



"No," he assured her, standing once more, "but do you feel . . ." He stopped and flapped his hands in frustration, as if he was trying to physically pull the needed word from his mouth.



"Feel what?" she asked impatiently.



"The history," Gary blurted. "The sense of history."



Diane sighed. "You don't know what made that hole," she reminded him, though she did not doubt Gary's claim of the German bombing and had, in truth, thought the same thing when she first saw the crater. "It could have been a car accident, or an IRA bomb from just a few years ago."



Gary was shaking his head.



"Besides," Diane went on stubbornly, "if you want a sense of history, then why did you rush us out of Westminster Abbey? You can't get more historical than that! Every king and queen from Britain's history, and the people who wrote their stories are buried in there. But here we are, out in the stupid rain, standing over a bomb hole in the sidewalk."



"That's different," Gary insisted, and he took a deep breath to clear his mind of the clutter. Diane did not seem convinced. "The history in there was our history," Gary explained deliberately. "Human history, purposely designed for us to go and see."



"Well then what's this?" Diane asked incredulously, pointing down at the crater. "Human history." "It's not the same."



"Of course it's the same!"



"No!" Gary insisted. "It's . . . this wasn't put here on purpose, for us to look at it. This was an unintentional side effect of a historical event. No after-the-fact markers, just a moment in time, caught and preserved. It's like finding a dinosaur footprint out in the woods. That's different from going to a museum and seeing reconstructed bones,"



"Okay," Diane readily conceded, still having no idea of the point of it all.



"That's why we're in London," Gary went on.



"I thought we were here on vacation," Diane quickly interjected, and though her words obviously stung Gary, he stubbornly pushed forward with his argument.



"That's why we're in England," he finished. "They've got more history here - without trying - than we can find back home."



"The United States was in World War II," Diane sarcastically reminded him.



Gary sighed and ran his hand over his cheek and chin. "But if we had any craters from German bombs, we would have filled them in," he lamented. "Like the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. We'd have built a bunch of new stuff around the site, explaining what happened in great detail, probably complete with movies you could watch for a quarter, instead of just letting the history speak for itself."



"I really don't know what you're talking about," Diane sighed. "And I'm really getting tired of walking in cold rain." She gave the crater a derisive look. "And you really don't know what made that," she added.



Gary had no retort; he just shrugged and started away, Diane loyally following. They soon found more craters - in the sidewalk and on the stone wall surrounding the large building - and then they spotted a small, unremarkable plaque set in the wall. It named this building as the Victoria and Albert Museum, and confirmed Gary's suspicions about the craters' origins, proclaiming that they were indeed a result of the German blitz. The proclamation came as only a very small victory for Gary, though, for Diane still didn't understand the point of it all and didn't look too happy. He understood and sympathized with her disappointment. This was supposed to be their vacation - their one vacation of the year! - and he was dragging her around in the rain, searching for sensations that she didn't understand.



Gary, of course, had not come to England to see the typical sights. He had come in search of something more elusive, in search of one of those diminishing bridges Mickey McMickey had spoken of, a link between his world and the world of Faerie. This would be the place, he had figured. Somewhere in the British Isles. Somewhere. But England, even London, wasn't quite as small as Gary Leger had figured. With that innate superiority so typical of third- and fourth-generation Americans, Gary had thought England and all the isles a small and rural place, a place he could thoroughly search in the two weeks he had off work.



There was nothing small or rural about London.



Three of those fourteen days were gone now, and all Gary had found was a small sense of history beside a chip in the sidewalk on a rainy London street. He was beginning to privately admit that London was too metropolitan, perhaps all of England was too metropolitan. Earlier that day, he had inquired of some Brits about the possibility of visiting Nottingham, remembering the "Robin Hood" movies and thinking Nottingham the pure English hamlet.



But the Brits assured Gary that Nottingham was not as he pictured it. It was a rough, blue-collar town, and according to those who knew, the remnants of Sherwood Forest amounted to about three trees. That notion stung Gary, reminded him of what had happened to his own precious woods in a land three thousand miles away.



It was true, as Mickey had lamented; the bridges from the real world to Faerie were fast disappearing. The next morning, Gary announced that they would leave London, would take Britrail to Edinburgh, four hundred miles to the north. To her credit (and partly because she wanted to see Edinburgh), Diane went along without complaint. She understood that something was deeply troubling her husband, and figured that the loss of her vacation was a small price to pay if allowing him his strange quest would bring him some measure of comfort. They weren't so far away from the first anniversary of Anthony's death, and Diane realized that Gary had hardly begun to recover from that loss.



Four hundred miles in four hours, and the two walked out of the Edinburgh train station for their first glimpse of Scotland. Since they were carrying all their luggage, Gary agreed to take a cab.



"So where ye goin'?" the cabby asked, more casually than any of the stuffy gents in the London black cabs had ever been.



Gary and Diane stared blankly at each other; they hadn't booked a room.



"Ah, ye've got no hotel," the cabby reasoned, and Gary looked at him hard, thinking how much his accent resembled Mickey's.



"Well, it's a wet time and there aren't too many visitors," the cabby went on. "We might be able to get ye something near to the castle."



"That'll be great," Diane quickly replied, before Gary could offer some other off-the-wall suggestion, and off they went.



A short while later they turned onto a wide boulevard, lined on the left by hotels, restaurants, and other shops that showed this to be a tourist section. A long park was on the right, down a grassy slope that put the widest part of the many blooming trees in the park at about eye level with the street.



"Castle o' the Rock," the cabby announced, looking to the right across the park.



Gary shifted low in his seat to get a better view past Diane and out the window. At first, he couldn't tell what the cabby was talking about, for all he saw through the tangle of trees was the park, and an occasional glimpse of the base of a hill across the way.



"Wow," Diane breathed when the trees thinned, and when Gary considered her, he realized that he should be looking up, not straight out. He leaned farther over her lap and turned his eyes skyward, up, up the hill that suddenly loomed more as a mountain. Up, up, hundreds of feet, to the walls of a castle that seemed to be growing right out of the top of the pillarlike mountain.



Gary couldn't find his breath.



"Stop the cab!" he finally blurted.



"What's that now?" the cabby asked.



"Stop the cab!" Gary cried again, crawling over Diane and grabbing at the door handle.



The cabby skidded over, and before the car had even come to a full stop, Gary was out of it, stumbling forward to the edge of the park.



Diane rushed to join him and took his trembling arm as he continued to stare upward, transfixed by the specter of Edinburgh Castle. Gary had seen this place before, this mountain and this castle. He had seen it in a different world, in a magical place called Faerie.



There the mountain was known as the Giant's Thumb, and this castle, Edinburgh Castle, was the home of a dragon named Robert.



A wyrm that Gary Leger had killed.



"Your father . . ." the soldier began, but Geldion waved a hand to silence the man. Though he had only been back on the field for a few minutes, the Prince had been told already - a half dozen times, at least - that his father was looking for him. And the last soldier, a friend of Geldion's, had added that King Kinnemore was not in good humor this day.



Neither was the exhausted Geldion, flustered from his uncomfortable flights to and from Ynis Gwydrin and even more so from his encounter with devious Ceridwen. The witch had made Geldion feel small, and Prince Geldion, forever fighting for respect in his father's cold eyes, did not like that feeling. The guards standing to either side of Kinnemore's tent apparently recognized the volatile Prince's foul mood, for they stepped far to the side, one of them taking the tent flap with him, offering Geldion an opening large enough for several men to walk abreast.



"Where have you been?" the scowling, always scowling, King Kinnemore asked before his son had even entered the tent. "I have an army sitting dead on a field." Kinnemore stood behind a smallish oaken desk, making him seem even taller and more imposing. Few men in Faerie reached the height of six feet, but King Kinnemore was closer to seven. His frame was lean, and yet he was broad-shouldered, and obviously physically powerful. He had seen fifty years, at least, but was possessed of the energy of a twenty-year-old. A nervous energy that kept him constantly moving, wringing his hands or stroking his perfectly maintained and regal goatee. His gray eyes, too, never stopped, darting back and forth, taking in all the scene as though he expected an assassin behind every piece of furniture.



"Ceridwen summoned me," Geldion remarked casually, and Kinnemore's continuing tirade came out as undecipherable babble. He finally slammed a fist down on the table, its sharp bang giving him a moment of pause (and opening a crack in the wood) that he might regain his always tentative edge of control.



"You above any should know that we must jump to the witch's call," Geldion finished, and there was a measure of sarcasm in his voice. He couldn't resist goading his father just a bit more. Geldion rarely pushed the King, knowing that he, like any other fool who opposed Kinnemore, would likely wind up with his head on a chopping block, but every now and then, he could not resist the opportunity to offer up a slight tweak. His father, eyes set in the midst of widening crow's feet, jaw so tight that Geldion could hear the man's teeth grinding, looked very old to the Prince at that moment. Old and angry. Always angry. Geldion could not remember the last fime he had seen Kinnemore smile, except for that wicked smile he flashed whenever he ordered an execution, or whenever he talked of conquest. Had it always been like this, always so filled with hatred and blood lust? Geldion couldn't be sure - all his clear memories fell in line with Kinnemore's present behavior.



But the Prince sensed that something had indeed changed.



Perhaps it was only wishful fantasies, and not true memories, but Geldion seemed to recall a time of peace and happiness, a time of innocence when talk was not always on war, and play was preferred above battle. A low growl escaped the King's lips, a guttural, animal-like growl. How could anyone be so horribly and perpetually angry? Geldion wondered.



"What did she want?" Kinnemore demanded.



The Prince shrugged. "Only to speak of Dilnamarra," he replied. "Of how we will use Baron Pwyll to anoint you as the slayer of Robert."



A sweep of Kinnemore's arm sent the small desk sliding out of the way, and the King advanced. "If you are plotting with her against me . . ." Kinnemore threatened, moving very close to his son, his long finger poking the air barely an inch from Geldion's nose. Geldion was more than a foot shorter than his imposing father, a fact that was painfully evident to the Prince at that moment.



Still, Geldion didn't bother to justify the threat with a denial. He could be rightfully accused of many less than honorable things in his life, but never once had he entertained a treacherous thought concerning King Kinnemore. Geldion's loyalty wasn't questioned in the least by any who knew him. By all his actions, he was the King's man, to the death.



He didn't blink; neither did Kinnemore, but the King did eventually back off a step and lower his hand. "What else did Ceridwen have to offer?" he asked.



"Nothing of any consequence," Geldion replied. "We force Dilnamarra into an alliance, and march east. Little has changed."



Kinnemore closed his eyes and slowly nodded his head, digesting it all. "When Braemar and Drochit are conquered, I want Baron Pwyll executed," he said, calmly and coldly.



"Baron Pwyll will be an ally," Geldion reminded him.



"An unintentional ally, in an alliance he will surely despise," Kinnemore reasoned. "And he will know the truth of the dragon slaying. That makes him dangerous." The King flashed that wicked smile suddenly as a new thought came to him. "No," he said, "not after the conquest. Baron Pwyll must die on the road to Braemar."



"Ceridwen will not approve."



"Ceridwen will still be imprisoned upon her isle," Kinnemore retorted immediately, and then Geldion understood his father's reasoning. By the time Drochit and Braemar fell, Ceridwen would likely be free, and then, unless the witch was in agreement with the double-dealing, Kinnemore would have more trouble striking out against Pwyll. But Ceridwen could do little to prevent the treachery while on her island.



Geldion smirked, marveling at the misconceptions the people of Faerie held concerning his father. Most of the commoners believed that Kinnemore was no more than Ceridwen's puppet, but Geldion knew better.



Ceridwen might indeed be the power behind the throne, but mat throne held a power all its own, a savage strength that scared Geldion more than the witch ever could.



"And what will that bode for the alliance?" the Prince asked as forcefully as he could.



"You will do it," Kinnemore went on, so entranced by his line of thought that he seemed not even to hear Geldion's protest. "You will make it appear as an assassination by one of the eastern towns. Or if you are not wise enough to follow that course, you will make it appear as though the fat Baron had an accident, or that his poor health simply overcame him."



Geldion said nothing, but his scowling expression revealed his sentiments well enough. He wondered of his own fate, should the truth come out. Would his father stand behind him if he was named as Baron Pwyll's executioner? Or would King Kinnemore wash his hands of Geldion's blood, brand him an outlaw and execute him?



Kinnemore just kept smiling, then, suddenly, snapped his hand down to grab Geldion by the front of his tunic. With horrifying strength, the older man easily lifted Geldion into the air.



Purely by reflex, the Prince put a hand to his belted dirk. His fingers remained on the hilt for only a moment, though, for even in defense of his own life, Geldion knew that he could not muster the nerve to strike out against his father.



"Get my troops moving," King Kinnemore growled. "You let Duncan Drochit and that wretched Lord Badenach escape once. I'll not tolerate another failure from you."



Geldion felt the man's savage power keenly at that moment. Felt it in his father's hot, stinking breath, the breath of a carnivore after a bloody kill.



He left Kinnemore's tent obviously shaken and walked across the field, trying to summon those distant, fleeting memories of his younger years, when Kinnemore had not been so angry.