The Last Dream by Gordon R. Dickson
“The gules, a saltire argent, of course,” went on the knight, “are the Nevile of Raby arms. My father, as a cadet of the house, differenced with a hart lodged sable—you see it there at the bottom. Naturally, as his heir, I carry the family arms.”
“Nevile-Smythe,” said Jim, remembering the name from the song.
“Sir Reginald, knight bachelor. And you, sir?”
“Why, uh…” Jim clutched frantically at what he knew of heraldry. “I bear—in my proper body, that is—”
“Quite.”
“A… gules, a typewriter argent, on a desk sable. Eckert, Sir James—uh—knight bachelor. Baron of—er—Riveroak.”
Nevile-Smythe was knitting his brows.
“Typewriter…” he was muttering, “typewriter…”
“A local beast, rather like a griffin,” said Jim, hastily. “We have a lot of them in Riveroak—that’s in America, a land over the sea to the west. You may not have heard of it.”
“Can’t say that I have. Was it there you were enchanted into this dragon-shape?”
“Well, yes and no. I was transported to this land by magic as was the—uh—lady Angela. When I woke here I was bedragoned.”
“Were you?” Sir Reginald’s blue eyes bulged a little in amazement. “Angela—fair name, that! Like to meet her. Perhaps after we get this muddle cleared up, we might have a bit of a set-to on behalf of our respective ladies.”
Jim gulped slightly.
“Oh, you’ve got one, too?”
“Absolutely. And she’s tremendous. The Lady Elinor—” The knight turned about in his saddle and began to fumble about his equipment. Jim, on reaching the ground, had at once started out along the causeway in the direction of the Tower, so that the knight happened to be pacing alongside him on horseback when he suddenly went into these evolutions. It seemed to bother his charger not at all. “Got her favor here someplace—half a moment—”
“Why don’t you just tell me what it’s like?” said Jim, sympathetically.
“Oh, well,” said Nevile-Smythe, giving up his search, “it’s a kerchief, you know. Monogrammed. E. d’C. She’s a deChauncy. It’s rather too bad, though. I’d have liked to show it to you since we’re going to the Loathly Tower together.”
“We are?” said Jim, startled. “But—I mean, it’s my job. I didn’t think you’d want—”
“Lord, yes,” said Nevile-Smythe, looking somewhat startled himself. “A gentleman of coat-armor like myself—and an outrage like this taking place locally. I’m no knight-errant, dash it, but I do have a decent sense of responsibility.”
“I mean—I just meant—” stumbled Jim. “What if something happened to you? What would the Lady Elinor say?”
“Why, what could she say?” replied Nevile-Smythe in plain astonishment. “No one but an utter rotter dodges his plain duty. Besides, there may be a chance here for me to gain a little worship. Elinor’s keen on that. She wants me to come home safe.”
Jim blinked.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Beg pardon?”
Jim explained his confusion.
“Why, how do you people do things overseas?” said Nevile-Smythe. “After we’re married and I have lands of my own, I’ll be expected to raise a company and march out at my lord’s call. If I’ve no name as a knight, I’ll be able to raise nothing but bumpkins and clodpoles who’ll desert at the first sight of steel. On the other hand, if I’ve a name, I’ll have good men coming to serve under my banner; because, you see, they know I’ll take good care of them; and by the same token they’ll take good care of me—I say, isn’t it getting dark rather suddenly?”
Jim glanced at the sky. It was indeed—almost the dimness of twilight although it could, by rights, be no more than early afternoon yet. Glancing ahead up the Causeway, he became aware of a further phenomenon. A line seemed to be cutting across the trees and grass and even extending out over the waters of the meres on both sides. Moreover, it seemed to be moving toward them as if some heavy, invisible fluid was slowly flooding out over the low country of the fenland.
“Why—” he began. A voice wailed suddenly from his left to interrupt him.
“No! No! Turn back, your worship. Turn back! It’s death in there!”
They turned their heads sharply. Secoh, the mere-dragon, sat perched on a half-drowned tussock about forty feet out in the mere.
“Come here, Secoh!” called Jim.
“No! No!” The invisible line was almost to the tussock. Secoh lifted heavily into the air and flapped off, crying. “Now it’s loose! It’s broken loose again. And we’re all lost… lost… lost…”
His voice wailed away and was lost in the distance. Jim and Nevile-Smythe looked at each other.
“Now, that’s one of our local dragons for you!” said the knight disgustedly. “How can a gentleman of coat armor gain honor by slaying a beast like that? The worst of it is when someone from the Midlands compliments you on being a dragon-slayer and you have to explain—”
At that moment either they both stepped over the line, or the line moved past them—Jim was never sure which; and they both stopped, as by one common, instinctive impulse. Looking at Sir Reginald, Jim could see under the visor how the knight’s face had gone pale.
“In manus tuas Domine,” said Nevile-Smythe, crossing himself.
About and around them, the serest gray of winter light lay on the fens. The waters of the meres lay thick and oily, still between the shores of dull green grass. A small, cold breeze wandered through the tops of the reeds and they rattled together with a dry and distant sound like old bones cast out into a forgotten courtyard for the wind to play with. The trees stood helpless and still, their new, small leaves now pinched and faded like children aged before their time while all about and over all the heaviness of dead hope and bleak despair lay on all living things.
“Sir James,” said the knight, in an odd tone and accents such as Jim had not heard him use before, “wot well that we have this day set our hands to no small task. Wherefore I pray thee that we should push forward, come what may, for my heart faileth and I think me that it may well hap that I return not, ne no man know mine end.”
Having said this, he immediately reverted to his usual cheerful self and swung down out of his saddle. “Clarivaux won’t go another inch, dash it!” he said. “I shall have to lead him—by the bye, did you know that mere-dragon?”
Jim fell into step beside him and they went on again, but a little more slowly, for everything seemed an extra effort under this darkening sky.
“I talked to him yesterday,” said Jim. “He’s not a bad sort of dragon.”
“Oh, I’ve nothing against the beasts, myself. But one slays them when one finds them, you know.”
“An old dragon—in fact he’s the granduncle of this body I’m in,” said Jim, “thinks that dragons and humans really ought to get together. Be friends, you know.”
“Extraordinary thought!” said Nevile-Smythe, staring at Jim in astonishment.
“Well, actually,” said Jim, “why not?”
“Well, I don’t know. It just seems like it wouldn’t do.”
“He says men and dragons might find common foes to fight together.”
“Oh, that’s where he’s wrong, though. You couldn’t trust dragons to stick by you in a bicker. And what if your enemy had dragons of his own? They wouldn’t fight each other. No. No.”
They fell silent. They had moved away from the grass onto flat sandy soil. There was a sterile, flinty hardness to it. It crunched under the hooves of Clarivaux, at once unyielding and treacherous.
“Getting darker, isn’t it?” said Jim, finally.
The light was, in fact, now down to a grayish twilight, through which it was impossible to see more than a dozen feet. And it was dwindling as they watched. They had halted and stood facing each other. The light fled steadily, and faster. The dimness became blacker, and blacker—until finally the last vestige of illumination was lost and bla
“Let’s hold together,” said the voice of the knight. “Then whatever comes upon us, must come upon us all at once.”
“Right,” said Jim. But the word sounded cold and dead in his throat.
They stood, in silence and in lightlessness, waiting for they did not know what. And the blankness about them pressed further in on them, now that it had isolated them, nibbling at the very edges of their minds. Out of the nothingness came nothing material, but from within them crept up one by one, like blind white slugs from some bottomless pit, all their inner doubts and fears and unknown weaknesses, all the things of which they had been ashamed and which they had tucked away to forget, all the maggots of their souls.
Jim found himself slowly, stealthily beginning to withdraw his forelimb from under the knight’s touch. He no longer trusted Nevile-Smythe—for the evil that must be in the man because of the evil he knew to be in himself. He would move away… off into the darkness alone…
“Look!” Nevile-Smythe’s voice cried suddenly to him, distant and eerie, as if from someone already a long way off. “Look back the way we came.”
Jim turned about. Far off in the darkness, there was a distant glimmer of light. It rolled toward them, growing as it came. They felt its power against the power of lightlessness that threatened to overwhelm them; and the horse Clarivaux stirred unseen beside them, stamped his hooves on the hard sand, and whinnied.
“This way!” called Jim.
“This way!” shouted Nevile-Smythe.
The light shot up suddenly in height. Like a great rod it advanced toward them and the darkness was rolling back, graying, disappearing. They heard a sound of feet close, and a sound of breathing, and then—
It was daylight again.
And S. Carolinus stood before them in tall hat and robes figured with strange images and signs. In his hand upright before him—as if it was blade and buckler, spear and armor all in one—he held a tall carven staff of wood.
“By the Powers!” he said. “I was in time. Look there!”
He lifted the staff and drove it point down into the soil. It went in and stood erect like some denuded tree. His long arm pointed past them and they turned around.
The darkness was gone. The fens lay revealed far and wide, stretching back a long way, and up ahead, meeting the thin dark line of the sea. The Causeway had risen until they now stood twenty feet above the mere-waters. Ahead to the west, the sky was ablaze with sunset. It lighted up all the fens and the end of the Causeway leading onto a long and bloody-looking hill, whereon—touched by that same dying light—there loomed above and over all, amongst great tumbled boulders, the ruined, dark and shattered shell of a Tower as black as jet.
III
“—why didn’t you wake us earlier, then?” asked Jim.
It was the morning after. They had slept the night within the small circle of protection afforded by Carolinus’ staff. They were sitting up now and rubbing their eyes in the light of a sun that had certainly been above the horizon a good two hours.
“Because,” said Carolinus. He was sipping at some more milk and he stopped to make a face of distaste. “Because we had to wait for them to catch up with us.”
“Who? Catch up?” asked Jim.
“If I knew who,” snapped Carolinus, handing his empty milk tankard back to emptier air, “I would have said who. All I know is that the present pat-tern of Chance and History implies that two more will join our party. The same pattern implied the presence of this knight and—oh, so that’s who they are.”
Jim turned around to follow the magician’s gaze. To his surprise, two dragon shapes were emerging from a clump of brush behind them.
“Secoh!” cried Jim. “And—Smrgol! Why—” His voice wavered and died. The old dragon, he suddenly noticed, was limping and one wing hung a little loosely, half-drooping from its shoulder. Also, the eyelid on the same side as the loose wing and stiff leg was sagging more or less at half-mast. “Why, what happened?”
“Oh, a bit stiff from yesterday,” huffed Smrgol, bluffly. “Probably pass off in a day or two.”
“Stiff nothing!” said Jim, touched in spite of himself. “You’ve had a stroke.”
“Stroke of bad luck, I’d say,” replied Smrgol, cheerfully, trying to wink his bad eye and not succeeding very well. “No, boy, it’s nothing. Look who I’ve brought along.”
“I—I wasn’t too keen on coming,” said Secoh, shyly, to Jim. “But your granduncle can be pretty persuasive, your wo—you know.”
“That’s right!” boomed Smrgol. “Don’t you go calling anybody your worship. Never heard of such stuff!” He turned to Jim. “And letting a george go in where he didn’t dare go himself! Boy, I said to him, don’t give me this only a mere-dragon and just a mere-dragon. Mere’s got nothing to do with what kind of dragon you are. What kind of a world would it be if we were all like that?” Smrgol mimicked (as well as his dragon-basso would let him) someone talking in a high, simpering voice. “Oh, I’m just a plowland-and-pasture dragon—you’ll have to excuse me, I’m only a halfway-up-the-hill dragon—Boy!” bellowed Smrgol, “I said, you’re a dragon! Remember that. And a dragon acts like a dragon or he doesn’t act at all!“
“Hear! Hear!” said Nevile-Smythe, carried away by enthusiasm.
“Hear that, boy? Even the george here knows that. Don’t believe I’ve met you, george,” he added, turning to the knight.
“Nevile-Smythe, Sir Reginald. Knight bachelor.”
“Smrgol. Dragon.”
“Smrgol? You aren’t the—but you couldn’t be. Over a hundred years ago.”
“The dragon who slew the Ogre of Gormely Keep? That’s who I am, boy—george, I mean.”
“By Jove! Always thought it was a legend, only.”
“Legend? Not on your honor, george! I’m old— even for a dragon, but there was a time—well, well, we won’t go into that. I’ve something more important to talk to you about. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the last decade or so about us dragons and you georges getting together. Actually, we’re really a lot alike—”
“If you don’t mind, Smrgol,” cut in Carolinus, snappishly, “we aren’t out here to hold a parlement. It’ll be noon in—when will it be noon, you?”
“Four hours, thirty-seven minutes, twelve seconds at the sound of the gong,” replied the invisible bass voice. There was a momentary pause, and then a single mellow, chimed note. “Chime, I mean,” the voice corrected itself.
“Oh, go back to bed!” cried Carolinus furiously.
“I’ve been up for hours,” protested the voice, indignantly.
Carolinus ignored it, herding the party together and starting them off for the Tower. The knight fell in beside Smrgol.
“About this business of men and dragons getting together,” said Nevile-Smythe. “Confess I wasn’t much impressed until I heard your name. D’you think it’s possible?”
“Got to make a start sometime, george.” Smrgol rumbled on. Jim, who had moved up to the head of the column to walk beside Carolinus, spoke to the magician.
“What lives in the Tower?”
Carolinus jerked his fierce old bearded face around to look at him.
“What’s living there?” he snapped. “I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough. What is there—neither alive nor dead, just in existence at the spot—is the manifestation of pure evil.”
“But how can we do anything against that?”
“We can’t. We can only contain it. Just as you—if you’re essentially a good person—contain the potentialities for evil in yourself, by killing its creatures, your evil impulses and actions.”
“Oh?” said Jim.
“Certainly. And since evil opposes good in like manner, its creatures, the ones in the Tower, will try to destroy us.”
Jim felt a cold lump in his throat. He swallowed.
“Destroy us?”
“Why
Lying on the ground before them was what once had been a man in full armor. Jim heard the sucking intake of breath from Nevile-Smythe behind him.
“A most foul death,” said the knight softly, “most foul…” He came forward and dropped clumsily to his armored knees, joining his gauntleted hands in prayer. The dragons were silent. Carolinus poked with his staff at a wide trail of slime that led around and over the body and back toward the Tower. It was the sort of trail a garden slug might have left—if this particular garden slug had been two or more feet wide where it touched the ground.
“A Worm,” said Carolinus. “But Worms are mindless. No Worm killed him in such cruel fashion.” He lifted his head to the old dragon.
“I didn’t say it, Mage,” rumbled Smrgol, uneasily.
“Best none of us say it until we know for certain. Come on.” Carolinus took up the lead and led them forward again.
They had come up off the Causeway onto the barren plain that sloped up into a hill in which stood the Tower. They could see the wide fens and the tide flats coming to meet them in the arms of a small bay—and beyond that the sea, stretching misty to the horizon.
The sky above was blue and clear. No breeze stirred; but, as they looked at the Tower and the hill that held it, it seemed that the azure above had taken on a metallic cast. The air had a quivering unnaturalness like an atmosphere dancing to heat waves, though the day was chill; and there came on Jim’s ears, from where he did not know, a high-pitched dizzy singing like that which accompanies delirium, or high fever.
The Tower itself was distorted by these things. So that although to Jim it seemed only the ancient, ruined shell of a building, yet, between one heartbeat and the next, it seemed to change. Almost, but not quite, he caught glimpses of it unbroken and alive and thronged about with fantastic, half-seen figures. His heart beat stronger with the delusion; and its beating shook the scene before him, all the hill and Tower, going in and out of focus, in and out, in and out…