"...S'a bloody nuisance, s'wot it es," he muttered resentfully. ""ow're we s'posed t' sleep in our own beds, Oi ask yoew sir? We carn't, 'at's 'ow, not wit' it roamin' about out there wot like 'et owns the woods, makin' all its bloody noise at night, burnin' all manner a' moi crops, an' 'ow'm Oi s'posed to make up fer wot crops Oi've lost, eh, wot with harvest season nearly on us..."
Sir Gregor the knight nodded companionably.
"It sounds like it," he said, having last tuned in several dozen words ago.If a woman had been present, she would have made the correct assumption that Sir Gregor was unmarried. Married men quickly learned, when the brain was preoccupied, to install a direct line from their ears to their mouth. This was an act of self-preservation, in the sense that most married men quickly tire of sleeping in the barn, especially if winter is on the horizon.
"...an outrage, I tell ye'. S'just not proper. It makes us look a laughin' stock, it dos! We pay our taxes, don't we, well, wot'r we payin' 'em for, then..."
Sir Gregor muttered another sound of agreement, looking over the piece of parchment in his hands. Apparently the local king had received an identical one several weeks ago, and Sir Gregor had happened to be passing through the area by the time the official flyers went up. It read:
THEE VILLUJMEN OF WEST LEMENS HAVE OF THEE PASSD 2 MUNS SUFFRD:
4 CROPS O KORN BURNT
3 CHIKNS BURNT
4 COWS ET
1 DOG OV FAMILY GONNE MISSSNG
1 TO MAY TO PACH TRAMPD
2 BLU BRRY PLOTS TRAMPD OR ET
1 MAIDEN WOMAN TAKIN DURIN WASHNG
Sir Gregor noted that the woman's abduction was not listed until last. This probably meant she was neither pretty, nor available. Funny how when it was beautiful virgins stolen away by monsters, their youth and purity was all anyone yammered about until the knight had brought them home. Sir Gregor often wondered if this was because of the desires of those who'd lost her or what they assumed of his own desires.
Dean Harper was a forward-thinking man. Organization was a priority in his life, the rows of various plants on his farm were kept in rigid, square-cut order, chickens were expect to lay on time and at a minimum of two eggs today--how Farmer Harper managed this, no one knew, though it was a subject of deep fascination in the local tavern--and though he couldn't read or write, he got the members of his family that could to make lists for him. Lists for supplies, for crops ready for harvest, crops already harvested, crops that had to be purged of rot and other mess, lists of tools needing replacement. His attention to detail was, Sir Gregor would later hear in the town's tavern, nothing short of a properly trained surgeon's attention to the placement of arteries in a major heart-surgery. These were admirable skills in, say, officials of government, or even the ambitious secretaries of successful merchants.
The universe had done Dean Harper a cruelty in having him born to a five-acre scrap of mud over a hundred miles from anywhere these skills might actually amount to anything. In the deepest recess of Farmer Harper's soul, he knew this, in a way, though he could not have put it to words had he been asked. And because of it he was a deeply resentful man.
He made up for it, as many such men do, by making mountains out of molehills and berating those around them until such molehills were reduced and organized into proper order. Now, for the first time in his life, Farmer Harper had been handed an actual mountain to complain about.
He was endeavouring to cultivate it into an entire continent.
"I mean, 'o ever 'eard of a bloody dragon comin' down to proper villages, like, and takin' up wot women is out don' 'ere laundries? S' bloody ridiculous! An' 'ere, 'lizabeth not even bein' a prop'r maid'n an' suchlike--"
There were two other men behind Farmer Harper. Sir Gregor noted one of them clenching his jaw and exchanging looks with the other. Whoever Elizabeth was, her husband was going to have words with Farmer Harper once he got his wife back. Possibly before. "--take proper prin-cesses an' the like, not bleedin' villagers, s'how it's always been, here now, what d'we pay our taxes for anyhow, Oi ask you sir? 'f bloody great dragons come'n down from'a mountains, wot's a' world comin' to, then--"
"I understand your...er...being upset," Sir Gregor finally cut the man off. "I'm sure there's just been a misunderstanding. I'll sort it out presently, my good man."
"Too right you 'ill!"
Sir Gregor straightened up, which caused a certain matter-of-fact clinking and clanking as Sir Gregor was, in fact, in full armour and he was, in fact, a knight in the service of High King George, whose authority was, in fact, currently present in the very shiney, very red emblem emblazoned on Sir Gregor's chest.
Farmer Harper swallowed hard as he remembered his place in the world compared to very shiney knights in very shiney armour with very shiney red symbols on their chests. "I, er, that is...we'd be mighty 'ppreciative if ye did, sir," he mumbled, dropping his eyes to the ground. "No disrespec' meant, m'lord."
"I'm sure there wasn't," Sir Gregor said coldly. Sir Gregor was typically kind when it came to dealing with peasants, after all, they were where the food came from, and Sir Gregor was nothing if not a fan of a well-marinated steak and fried onions with thick, hot, fresh bread at the end of the week. But he had no patience for Harper's sort, those that chose to be bitter about their lot in life and exacted their due from those around them.
After working out the directions to the dragon's cave and implying that a hot bath and warm meal waiting in the tavern at the end of the night would not go amiss, Sir Gregor the knight mounted his noble steed and trotted off to do his job. Farmer Harper gave a gruff snort and tromped off to see if his chickens had managed to lay their second round of eggs for the day. The other two men that had stood with him gazed off after Sir Gregor for another few minutes.
"So that were th' great big Sir Gregor we'm all been 'earin' about, eh?" said one after a while. "I thought e'd be taller. An' 'is skin's a bit dark, ain't it? Yew think 'e's foreign, or some such?"
The other one shrugged.
"We can' 'elp 'ow we're made, eh?" he said. "Anyway, if he gets rid a' th' bloody thing, 'o cares if he's foreign? Or short, for tha' matter. Don' matter wot a man's made of, long as 'e can do 'is job. S'what my pa always said."
Sir Gregor could indeed do his job, despite being only five and a half feet tall. When you had a sharp enough sword and a sturdy enough shield, the only matter that height factored into was that it made you a smaller target. As for Sir Gregor's skin, his mother would be considered a foreigner, though only by the sort of old ladies, most of them grandmothers, that gathered around some unlucky daughter-in-law's kitchen every teatime to discuss local politick in front of the stove.
People of the darker-skinned variety had sort of slid into every day society in most of the medium-to-larger sized towns and cities of the joint kingdoms of Argenwaul around a hundred years ago. Most of their ancestors had originally been slaves in a neighboring single kingdom that the kingdoms of Argenwaul had been at war with until recently, when the neighboring kingdom had been badly undermined from within by, shockingly, its own slaves. Argenwaul had not gone to war with its neighbor over the issue of slavery, but it had certainly made use of it by declaring it a non-issue within its own borders. Over half of the neighbor's work force--most of which was made up of slaves--had deserted in the first month before its government could come to terms with what was happening.
Argenwaul had only ever enslaved its own criminals, on the basis that people who stole property and lives should work to pay back whatever value of what they had taken, rather than sit in chains behind bars all day getting fed and being otherwise unconstructive. Originally they hadn't had much truck with peoples of different colour, mostly because Argenwaul was curiously lacking ambition in the exploring department and most that lived there had never traveled beyond their own kingdom's borders. Once people started hiring the darker-skinned foreign freed slaves of their now-dissolving neighboring kingdom, they'd found that all these dark fellows wanted was a decent home, good food, and a wife to come home to, and, well, that wasn't much different than them, now was it? And that was that.
As for Sir Gregor's father, he had been a general in the war and was now a retired noble living on a healthy plot of green field and rolling glen on the edge of one of Argenwaul's larger kingdoms, Althessa. He had met his wife when she and several other escaping slaves had run into his regiment in the woods. They had helped the healers patch up some of the soldiers, Sir Gregor's father among them, and his parents' eyes had met while his mother was putting a poultice on his father's leg. She'd stayed on to help the healers rather than following her fellows over the border, and she and the soldier with the deep grey eyes had married once the war was over. It was all very romantic.
Sir Gregor had little time for romance, himself.
He left his horse nibbling at a patch of stubby grass on the mountainside several hundred feet away from the cave, hiking the rest of the way himself. If a dragon attacked you, you weren't going to make it out of the cave anyway, and that was no reason to leave a good horse where it could get eaten or set on fire or both. When he reached the cave, he left his sword and shield leaning against a rock outside it, stepped up to the mouth, and called down it.
"HALLO THE LAIR!"
His call echoed down it, and then it was silent.
Sir Gregor went and sat on his rock. He pulled out a whetstone and, with an air of great nonchalance, began to sharpen his sword.
Within a few minutes, the sound of rattling scales became audible, and louder, until it stopped just inside the cave. Sir Gregor waited.
A jet of flame suddenly shot forth, razing the ground several dozen feet in front of the cave, and falling just short of where Sir Gregor sat. As it was, his sabatons became uncomfortably warm.
"Oh, good," Sir Gregor muttered under his breath, setting down his whetsone and sword. "This one's keen."
A bright red snout poked out of the cave, just far enough for a suspicious yellow eye to glare down it.
"And who might you be?" it demanded haughtily. Sir Gregor stood up and stretched.
"My name is Sir Gregor of Althessa," he announced. "As you can see, I have laid down my arms in a show of peace and good faith. I wish to commence negotiations with you regarding the village West Lemens and the woman you abducted from there some days ago. May I come in?"
The snouth sniffed and raised several inches.
"Have you brought me the objects of my demands?" it replied.
Sir Gregor felt his stomach sink. It was going to be a long day, and the sun had only risen a few hours ago. He sighed and took off his helmet, placing it next to his sword and stone on the rock. His long, rich, dark brown hair, tied back with a piece of string and shot through with tight waves, spilled several inches down his back plate.
"I'm afraid the villagers mentioned naught to me of your demands," he said. "Would you care to enlighten me?"
"I require several fattened cows, a dozen deer, a brace of fine hares and three jugs of milk to be left outside my lair by nightfall," the snout said. "And I will require this monthly, on the eve of the new moon, and if it is so much as a day late, I will take a member of the female sex from their brood and keep her with me until the demands are met." The snout added with a deep self-satisfaction, "I'm given to understand humans prize their females quite highly. Well, they shan't see hide nor hair of the one I've taken till you return with my tribute!"
"Oi!" Sir Gregor snapped as the snout moved to pull back inside the cave. "Now just you wait here, one minute." Sir Gregor walked, clinking and clanking, over to the mouth of the cave, and stood squarely in front of the juvenile red dragon standing just inside it. The youngster reared its head back to glare at them, nostrils flaring deeply as it breathed in.
"Don't you dare," Sir Gregor growled. The young dragon opened its glittering, toothy maw, and a deep orange glow lit the back of its throat. Flaring its wings, the youngster reared back on its hind legs to deliver a vengeful gust of flame-- --And lifted its head off the stone floor an hour or so later, blinking in confusion, a bad ache between its eyes and its stomach strangely cold. It swung its gaze around to meet that of Sir Gregor, who had moved helmet, sword, shield, and whetstone inside the cave to take shelter in its coolness from the near-noon sun. Somewhere in the process, he'd found a length of sweetgrass to suck on. He maneuvered it round to the corner of his mouth as the dragon drew another long breath--
--and choked as nothing came up but air and a bit of spittle. The dragon's eyes went wide in amazement that was slowly being overtaken by fear as it regarded the totally fearless and surprisingly short man who sat on a rock, slowly sharpening his sword. The dragon drew another, deeper breath, the scales around its chest and belly sliding unnervingly against each other as the dragon's body expanded and prepared to flame. Sir Gregor paused his sharpening to watch.
Finally the young beast gave up trying to flame, and grudgingly resigned itself to diplomacy.
The dragon made to speak and gagged, coughing raggedly. Its next attempt was a squeak, and by the third, it managed:
"Whort 'id 'ou d'?"
Sir Gregor grinned, a little meanly.
"S'an old trick most knights learn soon after they start dealing with dragons," he said, and went back to sharpening. "S'the soft spot under your belly. S'not really a soft spot, 'course, not in the scale--Mother Nature's a fine hand at turning out smart-made creatures, and she's not the type to put a hole where there should be scales. The soft spot's literally in your belly. Your fire belly, anyway. A good thump in the right spot and it stuns your fire gut. An equally good thump between a young dragon's eyes will put 'em down for about an hour, anyone knows that."
The juvenile glared.
"S' whhy not jus' kk'll me," it asked, sitting up.
"'Cause that's not how it works," the knight said amiably. "Most people think it is, or at least talk like it is, and it's how they write it in the history books, but no knight or dragon has killed each other in...oh...say, nine hundred years?"
The juvenile's eyes widened in astonishment.
"But I thought--"
"Aye, most people do, most people do," Sir Gregor said, nodding sagely. "Look, it should've been your parents telling you this, but how it works is this: a dragon comes along to a kingdom, nicks the princess, or a princess if there's more than one--usually the oldest--and after a week or two, or as soon as a knight comes along, or one is summoned, the knight'll ride up the mountain and tell the dragon how much the king has to pay. Usually a dragon doesn't ask too much, like, it'd be unreasonable to ask for the whole treasury, that kind of thing does get a dragon into trouble. Usually with their own kind. And then, after the treasure's sent up, the dragon hands over the princess and the knight escorts her back to her castle."
The dragon narrowed its eyes.
"But...why comply with the ransom in the first place?" it asked, puzzled. "Why not just kill the dragon or steal the princess back anyway?"
"Because one, your folk are bloody hard to kill, and a whole mess of knights were burnt to a crisp before they figured that out. And for two, well, after the ransom's paid, the dragon usually hangs around, maybe nicks a few princesses from surrounding kingdoms to add to his pile. And thing about anyone with a dragon living near them is, they aren't going to have too much trouble with bandits, cattle thieves, and highwaymen and the like. Dragons look after the land they're living on. They protect it from the outside and the inside. That's the pact."
The young dragon was taking all this in and rolling it over and over in its mind. "But..." it began slowly. "What if a dragon doesn't like treasure?"
Sir Gregor stared at it until it started to shift uncomfortably.
"Well...er...I'm not sure," he said slowly. "...Why do you ask?"
The young dragon hung his head a little and avoided her gaze. Sir Gregor's jaw dropped.
"Are you serious? You really don't like treasure?"
"I don't know! I don't think so. It's just...it's just a lot of metal, isn't it? And shiney rocks? And they aren't even very comfortable to lie on, I tried nesting like my parents showed me, and I got sore ribs for it. I just don't see the point, is all."
"Don't...see...the point?" Sir Gregor exclaimed. "But--you--it--you're a dragon! You have to like treasure! All dragons like treasure!" "And all human females wear dresses," the dragon said coldly.
Sir Gregor went very still. The dragon flared its small neck fans smugly. Finally Sir Gregor glared and demanded:
"All right, what gave it away?" The dragon sniffed.
"I can smell your sex, you know," it said arrogantly. "Your males and females smell different, just like dragons--just like anything, really. You stink of sweat and metal, but that was hardly going to cover it up."
Sir Gregor harumphed and began sharpening her sword again.
"Fine," she muttered. "So I'm a woman, so what? It doesn't make me not a knight, little whip, and it doesn't make you not a bloody fool. You're a dragon, and dragons hoard treasure, and they take princesses."
"But I don't want any treasure!" the dragon wailed. "I want food, proper food, not squirrels like I've had to eat, and if princesses are anything like the yammering creature I've had to deal with for the past two weeks, well, you can stuff that too! I don't care if that's how everyone does things, I don't have to do them that way if I don't want to!"
Sir Gregor raised an eyebrow.
"Firstly, yes, they can make you do things the way everyone else does things. Your own kind makes sure you lot do things the way they ought to be done--s'why we've got no more nonsense with princesses getting chained to rocks to get eaten, or knights getting cooked in their own armour, or, and this is important: villages getting burned to the ground. Which, while you haven't quite done that yet, you're getting dangerously close to doing. Hells bells, pup, you're lucky I got to you first, before they sent an inquisitor out to inspect you! You wouldn't like that, they're not nearly as gentle as I am--a thump between the eyes would be the least of your worries. And secondly--why the bloody hell have you been eating squirrels? A growing whip like you should be feasting on bucks, not squirrels." The young dragon hung its head again, and fiddled with the tip of its tail between its forepaws.
"I...I can't hunt properly," it admitted. "My parents didn't get to teaching me before I left. And...and that's why I had to take the cows, don't you see? I'm so hungry all the time and I just couldn't take it anymore..."
Sir Gregor felt a softening in her heart. She sighed pityingly, and hesitantly stood up and went over to pat the dragon on the shoulder.
"Er...there, there," she said gruffly. "I...look, I can see now this has all been a misunderstanding. That's why you've made these odd demands, is it? You need food you can't get yourself. It makes sense, it does, and I suppose it's rather clever of you, but...dragons don't make demands of villagers. They just don't. It's not sporting, and it's not fair--in fact, it's bloody indecent, and in this case, where you've actually taken one of them, and damaged crops--well, that's borderline cruel. These are no more than poor villagefolk. Whatever they beat out of the ground around here goes straight to their bellies, and it's rarely enough to fill them. All these things you've listed for them to bring you--it's downright impossible for them to actually meet these demands."
The young dragon's head drooped.
"But I don't know what else to do," it whined. "I don't know how to carry off princesses, I don't know how to hunt, I don't like treasure--what am I supposed to do?"
"Go home to your parents," Sir Gregor said flatly. "I don't know why you left them before you even knew how to hunt, but it's obvious you've got a lot left to learn before you're ready to start out on your own."
The dragon stiffened.
"I...I can't," it mumbled. "I can't go home."
"Why not?"
"I just can't," it said. "You wouldn't understand. It's...I...I just can't." Sir Gregor hesitated to press further. She, after all, had her own reasons for having left home and never returning. And if someone asked...well, her answers would also probably have to end in, "just can't." Sometimes you just had to, and you just couldn't explain why.
"Well, alright," she sighed. "But you've got to figure out what you're going to do with yourself. You can't keep doing this, and after you give the woman back, I wouldn't advise sticking around--you won't be able to keep on burning things and taking animals, the inquisitors will come after you, and if you just stop, the villagers might take it into their heads to actually try dealing with you themselves. You ought to leave, find another cave somewhere, away from humans until you figure things out."
"But I can't hunt for myself!" the dragon protested. "What I am going to do?" Sir Gregor looked out through the mouth of the cave, and her gaze went somewhere far beyond the horizon framed in its stoney walls. She had an inkling of an idea, and something much bigger than an inkling telling her it was a horrible one, that it could only end horribly, and she was a horribly stupid person for even thinking of it.
But Sir Gregor's gut was telling her that this didn't mean she shouldn't try, and that it would be wrong not to. And the reason Sir Gregor was so very good at knighting--and not just the peaceful negotiating aspect of it--was that she always listened to her gut.
"You go off over in the woods there, then, and I'll meet up with you by that big rock in the distance tomorrow morning," she told the young dragon some time later.
"In the morning?" the dragon asked, rearing its head back. "I have to spend all night out there? Why can't I spend it in my cave?"
"Because I'm going down there to tell the villagers it was a misunderstanding and I've run you off," Sir Gregor explained. "And once I do, they'll be up to your cave, with pitchforks and scythes and hammers, just in case, poking about for any treasure you may have left behind."
"But I've never had any treasure," the dragon said, exasperated.
"I know that," Gregor said, "and I could very well tell them that, and they'd laugh when I was gone and called me daft for saying it. Everyone knows dragons keep treasure, and they'll want their piece of it, after all the trouble you've given them, and if you're still there when they come up with their sharp things--and they'll bring them, just in case--they'll run you through out of sheer spite. So you go on along to that rock, and I'll pick you up tomorrow morning. Now get on, we're getting close, and I want you well away before they all come running out and cheering me as the damn big hero of the hour. Off you go!"
Grumbling under its breath, the dragon tucked its wings in tight so as not to catch on trees and cantered off into the woods. There was a reason dragons liked rocky mountainsides and caves. Several, actually, but not catching up their wings every few feet was a big one.
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