The Dragon's Boy Read online

  The cave was dark and silent and cold.

  He walked a few steps farther, then stopped, surrounded by the icy silence. Always before, even when the dragon was quiet, there was a sense of it, large and brooding, in the cave. But Artos knew, with a sudden certainty, that this time the cave was empty.

  Still, he called out again in a more mannerly way, putting hope ahead of certainty. “Sir? Father dragon? Are you home?” He put up a hand to one of the hanging stones to steady himself and his sword clanged on the ground.

  “It’s me. Artos. Pendragon. Son of the dragon. Are you there?”

  Then he laughed a forced little laugh that echoed peculiarly, like a demented dove’s coo. “You’ve gone out on a little flight, right?”

  It was the only answer that came to him, though the dragon had never once in their months together actually mentioned flying. But everyone knew that dragons had wings, great leathery wings stretched between mighty tendons. And wings, of course, meant flight.

  Artos laughed again, but this time it was a hollow little chuckle, as if the dove were mourning. He turned toward the small light at the cave’s entrance.

  “I’ll come back again tomorrow. At my regular time. And I’ll show you the sword then. I will. I promise.” He said it out loud, just in case the dragon’s magic and wisdom extended to retrieving words left in the still cave air. “Tomorrow.”

  9

  Friends

  BUT ARTOS DIDN’T GO back to the cave the next day, for the pattern had been subtly altered and, like a weaving gone awry, couldn’t be changed back to the way it had been without a weakness in the cloth.

  First of all, there was the sword. It changed Artos’ standing with the other boys and they invited him to practice with them. He understood that, with the sword, he was no longer a child to them, a child to be teased or ignored at will. With the sword he was immediately raised to the status of a young man, eligible to be a partner in their games, if not an altogether equal partner.

  Sword practice was not, of course, with swords but with stiff willow wands and under the watchful eye of the Master of Swords, a burly, brutish man whose broad arms were seamed with old scars.

  It turned out that Artos, being small, was compensatingly quick. He was able to turn and duck and roll away from blows that caught Cai on the shoulder and elbow and thigh, to the trumpeting encouragement of the Master. After Artos got the hang of it, he beat Cai soundly.

  However, his elation was short-lived. Bedvere beat him by simply overpowering him and Lancot beat him with smooth, liquid strokes that Artos could only admire. Still, he was one of them now, and the dragon’s familiar wisdoms seemed like nothing when compared to the unaccustomed and wonderful rioting of real friends.

  He spent both his small morning break and his longer afternoon break with his new friends, his voice roughening in their company, his language desperately off-color and mean. Many of the swears he used he didn’t even understand, but he borrowed them from the others and used them with fierce abandon.

  At dinner he amazed the boys with stories about naked warriors in the heather and carpets flying high above great towered cities.

  “You’ve made it up,” Bedvere said with admiration, though previously he’d called any of Artos’ stories lies.

  Artos didn’t deny it.

  Then he stumped them with a dizzying succession of riddles, only one of which Lancot got, and that only because he’d heard it somewhere before recently.

  “Do the cup game again,” Cai urged, his face red with laughter from the riddles.

  “Yes,” Bed and Lancot chimed in. “The cup game.”

  Artos found three identical cups, no chips or chinks to mark them out, and though there was no pea, he borrowed Cai’s crested ring. Six times he fooled them and not once did they check under all the cups, so sure that he’d never cheat. When Cai lost for the last time, he slapped Artos companionably on the shoulder and took back his ring.

  “Well done, Art,” he said, as if it had been the others who were fooled by the game and not he.

  That was friendship indeed, Artos thought as he went to bed that night, dreaming of his new manhood counted in willow wands, swords, cup games, naughty words, and lies.

  As if she already knew about the change in Artos’ status, Lady Marion called all four of the boys to her chambers in the morning. Since it was a summons from the chatelaine herself, the Masters of Hounds and Hawks couldn’t fault Artos for being late. He smoothed his fair hair down carefully, paying special attention to the cowlick in the front, and waited with Bedvere and Lancot outside the door while Cai went in to see his mother alone.

  A minute later, Cai stuck his head out of the door. “Hullo,” he called. “All in.”

  They went in, Lancot in the lead, Bed next, and last Artos conscious of the newness of his position. He was determined to say nothing that might be taken as a mistake.

  Looking around as unobtrusively as he could, Artos was awed by everything. There were floor-to-ceiling hanging tapestries with picture-story designs, many of which he recognized from the dragon’s tales—Adam and Eve with fig leaves on one, the children of Pryderi on another, a third with what could only have been the alphabet of trees. He tried not to stare. There were cut flowers arranged in bowls and hanging pots of flowering plants, and a mix of rushes and dried verbena on the floor, all of which lent the room a sweet, fresh smell. Women, he thought with both admiration and envy, have the best of it. He wondered if his own mother had dwelled in such a room.

  In a gown the color of new primroses, Lady Marion sat in a high carved chair whose back quite dwarfed her. An illuminated Bible rested on her lap. As the boys filed in, she closed the book and handed it to Cai, who set it on the lectern near the hearth. Waving the boys to stand before her, her rings winking at them in the sunlight, Lady Marion waited until they were fully at attention. Then she smiled.

  “Good boys, and an especial welcome to you, young Artos. I understand from our Cai that you are become a man.”

  Artos bobbed his head and said, quite quietly in case it was the wrong thing to say, “I have a sword now, Ma’am.”

  “And so you do, with a fine watering down the blade,” she said. “Cai says it looks like a rush of wind.”

  “Like dragon’s fire, Ma’am,” he said. Then, seeing her smile again, he wondered if he should have been silent. But her smile was sweet, not forced. It’s all right then, he thought.

  “You will need a new suit of clothes to go with your new state. More gentlemanly and less…less…kennel boy. Sylvia?” She turned and nodded to one of her maids, who stepped forward in a wave of perfume that made Artos quite dizzy. “Be sure and find something his size but allow for growth. He’s small now, but young men grow so rapidly once they begin.”

  Artos felt his cheeks grow hotter with each word. It was bad enough being small and insignificant, but far worse having it pointed out in so public a fashion by a lady, especially in such gentle and caring tones. Fortunately, Lady Marion changed the subject. Not, Artos suspected, to spare his feelings but because the subject had been exhausted.

  “Now there is to be a market fair in Shapwick next week and another three days after in Woolvington. Since it’s but a short autumn till the Holy Days are here, we must start thinking about gifts. Remembering, always, that not everyone here at Beau Regarde is Christian as Sir Ector and I and all of you are. We have some who still follow the Druids…”

  “Old Linn,” Cai whispered out of the side of his mouth.

  Lady Marion ignored him, “…and some of the old soldiers, bless them, still drink bull’s blood and worship Mithras, though I believe they do it less out of religious fervor than out of companionship. Old boys together. They think I don’t know about their little meetings under the castle in that rabbit warren of rooms down there, but I do.”

  She seems to be saying it as a kind of warning, thought Artos. But Cai whispered to him, “Father has promised to take us all.”

  Artos gla
nced at him. Us all. Did Cai mean to include him, too?

  “We shall therefore need silks and jewels and some good Scottish wool,” Lady Marion concluded.

  Lancot nudged Artos. “I thought all Scots went naked,” he whispered.

  “Only into battle, Lancot,” said Lady Marion smoothly. “They are perfectly well clothed at other times and their wool is the best in the known world.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Lancot said, dimpling a smile at her.

  “Now your father is out after that stag again, Cai.” She rolled her eyes as if to admit silently that sometimes men could be a terrible burden. “And probably drinking himself into another attack of the gout, which he will blame on the weather or the wiliness of the white beast. So I daren’t accompany you. Someone has to see to the running of this household. And poor old Merlinnus is bedridden with the miseries. He can’t take you boys as he did last year. But you, Cai, are quite grown-up now. Can I expect you to guide these other three gentlemen as befits the son of Sir Ector and the heir to Beau Regarde?”

  Bed nudged Lancot. “Good Old Linn, going sick like that.”

  Lancot bit his lips thoughtfully before nudging Artos.

  But Cai, under his mother’s direct scrutiny, stood straight and tall. “Yes, mother, you can count on me.” He knelt and kissed her hand.

  “And promise me you will be especially careful of young Artos. He’s not been away from this castle since…since being brought here all those years ago. I would not have him lost or hurt for anything.”

  “Not for anything, Mother,” Cai assured her.

  Artos didn’t like the way he said it.

  They managed to get out of Lady Marion’s room with only one other nudge from Bed and several winks from Cai as he turned toward them, ushering them out with quick waves of his hands. They filed out as they had come in, with Cai in the lead and Artos at the tail.

  When he looked over his shoulder for one last glance, Artos noticed a strange expression on Lady Marion’s face. In that moment, he realized that she’d seen all the nudges and winks and yet was prepared to ignore them because there was a time in a young man’s life when he had to make choices on his own. Yet that expression also said that she knew her son for a wastrel, Bed for a bully, and Lancot for a generous fool. She nodded gravely at Artos, as if they’d a secret between them, as if she were saying to him—only to him—

  “They’ll be boys all the rest of their lives, but I know I can trust you.”

  He didn’t understand how he knew all that from a single glance, but he did. He nodded gravely back at her. Then one of the maids—the one with all the perfume, Sylvia—closed the door and Lady Marion was shut off from his sight.

  10

  At the Fairs

  AT THE AFTERNOON BREAK they played at the wands again, and again Artos beat Cai. This time he beat Bedvere as well by dancing away from the powerful strokes and making Bed look like a clumsy bear. Before he could have a go at Lancot, all three ganged up on him and pushed him to the ground, and the Master of Swords never protested.

  Cai stuck a wand right at his throat, so hard it hurt. Bed lashed his arms twice on each side until Lancot pushed him away. But all the time Artos never cried “Hold,” and there’d been not even a hint of tears in his eyes, only a bright, blazing anger.

  They let him up then and brushed him off, admiring him for his courage. The Master of Swords, his scarred arms folded in front of his chest, grunted his approval as well.

  “Good show,” Cai said, throwing his arm around Artos’ shoulder. “And no blubbing. My mother wouldn’t be worried about you if she’d seen that!”

  Bedvere’s only comment was a beneficent growl.

  It was Lancot who whispered, “Never mind them. They won’t bother you again now that you’ve shown your true colors. Tell us another story.”

  So he told them about the men in the Indies walking about on their hands, as if the beating had never happened, as if both his arms weren’t striped with stinging red welts and a bead of black blood didn’t rest like a jewel in the hollow of his throat. He’d never mention them ganging up on him, would not even allude to it. That’s how such games were played, and he knew it without having to be told. Besides, they genuinely seemed to like him now. So everything really was all right.

  He forwent dinner to go back to the dragon’s cave. He carried no bowl of gravy, for he was still angry with the dragon for going off like that without a word. But he did bring the sword, sheathed at his side.

  “And if there’s wisdom in that,” he muttered to himself as he scrambled over the stone outcroppings, “it’s that I, at least, keep promises.” He conveniently ignored the fact that he was a day late in keeping this one. A marsh harrier screamed a kind of punctuation to his mutterings.

  The cave entrance seemed even darker and more uninviting than usual. Inside, it was silent as a tomb. But Artos had worked himself up to such a pitch of anger at the miserable wyrm’s desertion that he was glad the place was empty. He expended several minutes calling the dragon some of the awful names he’d learned at swordplay the day before—canker, pismire, firebrat, chinch—and felt better immediately. The cave echoed loudly with the swears.

  When the sound of them was done, Artos smiled feebly. “If you can go off without telling me,” he whispered into the black, unforgiving chamber, “I can go off without telling you.”

  Then he set his chin, turned his back to the cave, and walked slowly along the path to Beau Regarde, the weight of the sword causing him to cant to one side.

  The journey to the market towns was to take a fortnight, though they packed as if going for a full month. The preparations themselves seemed to take as long. They packed and repacked the saddlebags, counted and recounted the monies Lady Marion set out for them, and listened seven times over to their instructions. Artos even suggested to the other boys that their heads were packed as tightly as their bags, and they adopted that as their motto for the journey.

  “Instructions from Lady Marion, instructions from Cook, instructions from the Master of Swords…and still this,” Cai said, his face narrowing into its pout. By this he meant the four soldiers sent along as bodyguards.

  It isn’t so much a boy’s trip as one of those caravans in far Araby the dragon spoke of, Artos thought. But he gloried in it anyway.

  As they rode along, their cheeks were polished apple red by the cold autumnal winds. On the second day the weather broke and gray clouds rode sullenly over the brooding Mendip Hills. The leaves and grass seemed a darker green than before, and that was when the rain actually started, lightly at first like a fine mist. Then, as if the heavens had been slit open with a knife, rain torrented down.

  They sheltered as best they could in a copse of trees, the horses stomping restlessly under the drip-drip-dripping from the overhanging branches. There was no lightning, and Artos alone was relieved. The dragon had told him a man could die struck by lightning and that lightning sought the high point, like a tree. The dripping of the rain down the back of his neck was all part of the adventure. Even the discomfort seemed fun, though Cai complained bitterly and long, as if the rain had been sent just to plague him.

  At Shapwick there was a junior tournament for boys under sixteen. The other three signed up at once, but Artos held back. He’d really only worked with wands and not his sword, though he’d brought it with him, of course. And he was curiously reluctant to use it against another person in fun. But he was loud in his cheering for his three friends, so much so that many people turned to smile at him for his boisterous loyalty.

  Cai was eliminated in the first round, but by a giant of a boy, so he didn’t feel too terribly downcast. And when that giant was beaten in the final round by Bed, in a long and sweaty battle, Cai was positively elated.

  Lancot won with the lance.

  Artos was agog at the banners and drums and horns and—quite frankly—at the enormous numbers of people. The closest he’d ever come to seeing that many people in one place had been th
e last time the High King had visited Sir Ector, and that had been several years earlier, with scarcely a tenth of the crowd. He stored up the faces and the sounds and the smells to take back with him.

  He especially liked the pie sellers and was nearly sick from eating six pork pies in quick succession, the hot, tangy sauce running down his chin. Luckily the pieman ran out of pies before Artos ran out of coins, and he spent the last of that day’s coins to listen to a traveling troupe of players who told “The Conception of Pryderi” better than anyone he’d ever heard.

  Five days later at Woolvington’s wool fair, when they were settled at a fine inn, Cai kissed Olwen, a serving girl, and even told her that he loved her. But then, privately, he said horribly funny things about her to Bed and Lancot and Artos. Artos felt awful about it, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to Cai. As Cai continued all evening to make jokes about the girl—about her fat ostler father and her ugly mother who was the inn’s cook—Artos fell to remembering the way he’d treated poor garlicky Mag. He felt his chin sink lower and lower onto his chest and he wondered what to do. Since he didn’t want to lose his new friends, he didn’t protest, but he began to think a lot about the dragon’s wisdoms.

  It wasn’t until their last evening at Woolvington fair, with Olwen sitting all unhappy by Cai’s side and Cai winking broadly at his friends as if to remind them about his jokes at her expense, that Artos finally knew what he had to do.

  He had been asked to sing and had gotten through several songs when he remembered one the dragon had taught him called “Olwen the Fair.” It was a sad song, really, for in the end Olwen dies. But it was lavish in its praise for the song’s Olwen, for her fair cheeks and eyes the blue of cornflowers. He sang it directly to Cai’s wench, ignoring the smirks and giggles of the other boys. He let her know with the song that he, at least, honored her.

  At the song’s end Cai’s yellow-haired Olwen was so touched, she gave Artos a kiss and went out of the room with her head held high. Cai was a bit annoyed at losing her. And the guards who had accompanied them did not understand.