Free Dragonslayer: A Novel by Wayland Drew Page A

were bound behind her back. It watched with increasing interest as the warrior led her to a charred trunk and tied her firmly, facing the cave's mouth. Anticipating what would now occur, the dragon emitted a fiery breath that jetted at least fifty feet beyond its ledge. The black-clad horseman retreated slowly backwards, grinning the fixed and ghastly grin of frightened warriors. The woman swooned; her head fell forward on her breast, and long black hair shrouded all her features. The horses cantered clattering down the stony hillside.
    With a gentleness almost tender, Vermithrax glided off the ledge and alighted on a knoll a few yards from the woman. Some fresh movement of the air, a sound like shredding silk, aroused the girl, and she raised her head and looked into the eyes of the dragon. She did not cry out—she was far beyond screaming or struggling against the rawhide thongs; besides, as she gazed into those unmoving eyes, wonder replaced her fear. She found herself staring through the corridors of centuries, down, down and back to the first pulses that were the start of time. It seemed that she herself was the sole end toward which all life had blindly surged. The grime and tears on her face, the blood congealing on her wrists and hands, the torn and besmirched smock she wore, all these ceased in the instant to have significance. She felt pure, radiantly beautiful, and wise beyond all comprehension. Incredibly, she smiled.
    And Vermithrax, in a transport of admiration and baleful desire, opened its thin-skinned dragon lips, and sighed . . .
    From their distance, the villagers saw a lolling tongue of flame, heard a sound like a great bird passing overhead in the night. In a little while they returned singly and in pairs to Swanscombe, and they did not speak, and they did not look into one another's eyes.
    Later, when the sun had reached its zenith, the sated Vermithrax raised its head and uttered the long, sorrowful dragon cry of triumph and of loss, staring wide-eyed into the heart of the sun. Again and again it cried, but there came no answer except for echoes rebounding among the crags.
    Much later—the legend did not say how long, it could have been a year or ten years after the first coming of Vermithrax to Swanscombe—the dragon mated. At sunrise when the sun was a mere bead on the eastern horizon, another dragon swept down the Swanscombe valley, and Vermithrax rose exultantly to meet it. Male-female, female-male, in that amorphous condition in which polarities are sensed merely, existing unformed for future convolutions of the species, they yearned toward each other in the pale clear air of morning, circling slowly, uttering high-pitched cries. When they met at last, cowled by the shifting curtains of the sun, not even the falcons which had accompanied them to that pitch, like lilting bridesmaids, were witnesses to the union, and the villagers in the valley far below saw nothing but the swirling sun itself. Certain it is that they mated; and it is probable that the decades of dragon gestation began for both.
    Many years later, at the very hour when the Swanscombe pilgrims approached Ulrich's Cragganmore, Vermithrax lay deep within its earth beside the lake where weird flames played across the surface. For many hours the dragon had not moved. Only its hide moved, twitching and flickering over its great length. But then, imperceptibly at first, its lower regions began convulsive undulations that grew gradually quicker and sterner. Giving birth, Vermithrax saw amidst the visions of the burning lake the image of a bent old man gripping a boy by the shoulder. In the other hand, the old man held an object that the dragon could not discern before the vision faded into a conflagration which, to the dragon, was indistinguishable at that moment from its own agony. Into the cradling safety of its coils it produced three glistening and translucent eggs, cowled in a single membrane.
    Sunlight as palpable as water flooded