The Broken World, page 5
‘What is it?’ Melyn leaned forward in his saddle the better to see.
‘A man died here, and then his body was consumed by the Fflam Gwir.’ Frecknock stood once more, handing the object to Melyn. He turned it over in his hand, noting the pure gold and the worn stampings that marked it as a coin. It was no currency he knew, but he recognized it as something he had seen before. There had been a handful of them in the cave where Errol and the dragon Benfro had been hiding, left behind along with several other valuable trinkets.
‘The boy was here, and the dragon too.’ Melyn slipped the coin into a pocket in his travelling cloak, wondering who the man was and how he had died.
‘Benfro did this.’ Frecknock stood up, backing away from the pile of wet ash, and Melyn thought he saw her shudder again. ‘Only a dragon could conjure this flame. But how? He has no herbs, no oils. He doesn’t know the spells.’
‘He doesn’t need spells; he breathes fire.’
‘He …’ Frecknock lifted a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide. ‘I can’t believe … Not Benfro …’
‘He breathes fire. Is that any more shocking than him growing wings and flying?’
‘Your Grace, you have no idea.’
‘Enlighten me then.’
‘Breathing fire is something the old creatures did, before Great Rasalene showed us the way of the Grym. It’s unnatural, bestial. No dragon would ever do it. The Fflam Gwir comes from Gwlad, not from us.’
‘Well, this came from Benfro, which means he passed this way. And by the look of that ash, not long ago either. Another couple of heavy showers and there’ll be nothing left to see.’ Melyn looked up at the sky, dark with gathering rain clouds, then back at the patch of damp ash. There was something odd about it, and as he looked, it came to him. The grass was not burned. Fronds were poking up through the pile, paler green where they had been hidden from the sun for a while. He put his hand back in his pocket and drew out the coin. It was scuffed and worn, but a fire that could have rendered a man to ash would have surely melted it. Even the magical fire he had conjured to dispose of the dead Llanwennog villagers had burned with a terrible heat.
‘How is it this coin survived intact? Why isn’t the grass burned?’
‘The Fflam Gwir burns only dead flesh and bone and scale. As we come from the Grym, so it takes us back when we are dead.’ Frecknock sounded like she was reciting a passage from a litany.
‘Then how do you account for Osgal’s burns? How could Benfro produce this flame in the aethereal?’
‘I truly do not know, Your Grace. He should not be able to breathe fire at all. This is something I’ve never encountered before.’
Melyn could see Frecknock’s fear as she spoke, and it made him feel better. She knew how precarious her position was; knew that she could be killed in an instant should she stop being useful. Admitting that there was something she didn’t know meant that her end was a little bit closer.
‘Well then, let us hurry into town before my warrior priests kill everyone. Perhaps one of the good citizens of Cerdys will be able to shed some light on the matter.’
Dafydd didn’t know who was the more astonished, the dragon, Usel or himself. They all stood motionless, staring at each other for long moments. It seemed as if the chittering forest noise and babble of the stream had been cut off. It was Iolwen who finally broke the stillness.
‘Um. Hello?’ She spoke in Llanwennog, taking a single pace forward from their group and opening her arms wide in a gesture of peace. The dragon said something incomprehensible. Its voice was melodic, almost hypnotizing, and though he couldn’t understand the words, Dafydd thought he would be happy to listen to it for ever. Then Usel spoke, and his words were a crude imitation of the dragon’s, halting and uncertain but clearly the same language. Dafydd heard his own name, and Iolwen’s, and assumed that they were being introduced to the beast.
She replied with a smile and a nod. He didn’t know how, but he understood then the dragon was female. He had only ever seen one of her kind before, at a circus many years earlier. That creature had been male and nothing like as large or splendid as this one. Her scales glistened in the evening sunshine, reflecting a thousand different colours. Her tail coiled around her massive legs like some tame snake, its tip pointed and spiky. Long sharp talons sprang from her feet, and her fingers ended in lethal claw-like nails. Narrow fangs protruded past her lips, white as bone against the darkness of her face. She was fierce and yet also somehow unthreatening.
Dafydd listened as she spoke some more unintelligible words in that strange lilting accent. He felt at peace, relaxed and calm. The whole clearing was a safe place, a magic place.
‘But this is wonderful.’ Usel’s words broke through Dafydd’s reverie, bringing him back to the real world with a start. How long had he drifted? He had no idea. But somehow he had taken Iolwen’s hand in his own.
‘You can speak to her?’ he asked.
‘After a fashion. My Draigiaith is very poor, and she speaks a dialect I’ve never heard before. But I think I get the gist of her story. She’s lost. One moment she was flying over the forests, searching the islands for more of her kin, the next she was in a land she didn’t recognize. When she approached a town of men for help, they pursued her with weapons and magic, tried to kill her. She escaped and flew here, feeling the call of this place. But the carving puzzles her. She knows of no reason why anyone should have created it. No dragon has ever courted such veneration, she tells me. Her mistress would be appalled.’
‘Her mistress? Who could command such a creature? Does this dragon have a name?’ Dafydd’s questions bubbled out of him as if he had no control over his actions.
‘She is Merriel, daughter of Earith. At least I think that’s what she said. Not a dragon I’ve ever heard of, I have to admit. But as to her mistress, that’s far more revealing. She is the dragon portrayed in this carving.’ Usel pointed to the great rock face. ‘Earith, favoured of the Shepherd. Gifted with the powers of healing. In human guise at least she is the founder of our order. Her existence as a dragon is … troubling to those who would see dragons as mere beasts.’
Dafydd began to ask how that could possibly be, but he was interrupted by shouts from behind and above. Whirling he saw Captain Pelod and his guards charging towards their little group, potent blades shining in the gloaming and eyes filled with bloodlust. On the ridge above them sailors appeared with crossbows, and before he could say anything the air was full of ill-aimed bolts.
‘Hold!’ Dafydd threw all of his will into the command, reaching out to everyone he could see. His voice echoed around the narrow valley end, bouncing off the rock wall and seeming to amplify with each repeat. A flock of brightly coloured birds clattered into the air from the nearby trees with squawks of alarm. The attack stopped as if it had run into an invisible wall. Pelod looked for a moment as if he had been slapped, and an unnatural quiet descended on the scene.
‘What were you doing?’ Dafydd asked as the guards extinguished their blades.
‘We saw the beast attacking you.’ Pelod’s words were uncertain, as if he was no longer quite sure what he had seen.
‘She was doing nothing of the sort. We’re in no danger from this dragon.’ Usel turned away and said something to the startled creature in its own language. Dafydd felt something brush his mind, like the touch of King Ballah, and then he understood her words.
‘There is much to learn about this world into which I have stumbled. It is a place where men are cruel and wield the subtle arts with a brutality I’ve rarely seen. But you, Prince Dafydd, have shown me kindness. I shall not forget it.’
For a fleeting instant Dafydd felt something of the dragon’s thoughts. She was old, far older than he could conceive. And she had seen much, felt joy and sadness through her long life. He caught glimpses of a world where dragons wheeled and turned in the sky, as numerous as crows, as elegant as eagles. Then that connection was broken, leaving him feeling flat. Merriel daughter of Earith bowed once to the small party, then stepped back and away from them. Dafydd knew what she was about to do and, still holding Iolwen’s hand, he pulled his wife away.
‘Come, Usel, you’re in her way,’ he said, and the medic looked startled as if he were a little boy caught dreaming during his lessons.
‘What?’
‘She needs room. Come.’ Dafydd walked over to where Captain Pelod was standing at the head of his men. ‘It’s all right, Jarius. She means us no harm. Quite the opposite, indeed.’
Opening her wings wide to the last rays of the evening sun, the dragon took a couple of steps forward and sprang into the air. The wind washed over them as she passed, bringing with it the spiced scent of the nearby treetops. Once, twice, she wheeled around the valley, gaining height all the while. And then, with a haunting cry that filled Dafydd with melancholy, she sped off towards the horizon.
‘Fly, beast. I know you can. Now fly.’
Benfro felt the sting of a whip across his back as he lumbered around a large oval ring formed by the parked circus wagons. He couldn’t quite understand why he was running, why he didn’t stop and turn on the hateful man standing on a wooden crate in the middle of the ring. Something wasn’t right in his mind. He could think, and feel the rage building up in him, but he couldn’t stop his body from doing what it was told.
‘Up, I say. Up, beast.’ The words were punctuated by nips from the sharp metal point worked into the end of the whip. Benfro knew it well. Every evening for over a week he had been forced to endure this humiliation. Hating himself and hating his captors even more, he opened his wings and leaped into the air.
It was difficult. The circus master’s commands prevented him from going higher than the tops of the wagons, and the ring was too small for comfort. The ends of his wings were sore from repeatedly banging into things, and he had developed a sort of half-folded flight that made the muscles in his back scream in pain after just a few minutes.
‘Now land.’ Before he could even think about it, Benfro obeyed. It galled him that so commanded he seemed able to take off and land far better than he had ever managed in the months he had practised in Corwen’s clearing.
‘Good. That’s better.’ The circus master stepped down off his box and walked over to where Benfro stood. Loghtan, he was called, and his son was Tegwin. Benfro wasn’t sure who he hated the most. Tegwin was cruel because he liked it, and didn’t confine his cruelty to the animals in the circus. Most of the people gave him a wide berth too, especially when he had been drinking. But Loghtan was cruel because that was the only way he seemed to know how to get what he wanted. Benfro didn’t suppose the man had ever said please, or simply asked someone for a favour. It was his nature to demand, with a crack of the whip or a fist to the head to make sure his demand was met swiftly.
‘You should have learned by now that I always get my way.’ The circus master reached up and clipped a long rope to the chain halter fastened around Benfro’s neck when he had first been captured. Loghtan wasn’t a big man, not tall like Inquisitor Melyn’s captain. He was short and wiry, with a dark face creased by an outdoor life. What little hair he had left curled tight around the edges of his scalp in shades of greasy grey, and spilled out of his overlarge ears. Benfro knew that he could reach out, pick him up and break his back in a single motion. He remembered the ease with which he had killed the man attacking Errol; they broke easily, these people. And he remembered too the fire he had breathed, reducing the dead body to nothing but fine ash. Well, a body didn’t need to be dead first, did it? All he had to do was summon up the flame and breathe.
Instead he bowed his head, the easier for Loghtan to tether him like a dog. Though his every thought screamed ‘Kill!’, he could do nothing but collude in his own entrapment and humiliation.
Loghtan led him out of the ring through a gap in the wagons, and Benfro followed as docilely as any pack mule. He hunched himself down, his wings folded as tightly to his body as possible in shame as they went past the campfire. The circus performers were having their evening meal, and the smell of cooking meat made his stomach gurgle. Benfro had eaten nothing for days but the rancid scraps thrown into his cage each morning. He knew they were laden with whatever drug it was that Loghtan used to control him, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from eating. One barked command from his new master was all it took.
The large wagon was parked at the edge of the camp, its sides down for a change, letting the warm plains air through the metal bars. It looked like one of the animal handlers had thrown a few buckets of water in, no doubt as a token gesture towards cleaning out the mess. The cage was large enough to house two dragons, but not so big that they could avoid fouling it. As he was led up the short ramp and waited for Loghtan to open the vast padlock, Benfro looked across to the nearest wagon, where the two lioncats sat, staring despondently at nothing in particular. They were so bowed down, so defeated as to be barely alive. He was beginning to know how they felt.
‘In.’ Loghtan’s command was necessary; Benfro could do almost nothing without the circus master’s express order. He bent low and squeezed through the small door. Inside the cage what little straw that hadn’t been washed out was sodden and rank-smelling. The other dragon sat at the far end, staring at the sunset over the grassland. He didn’t move as the door was slammed shut and locked again.
‘Rest yourself. We’ll have another practice in the morning before we leave. I want you to put on a good show for the king.’ With a last flick of his whip across the bars, Loghtan strode off in search of some food.
There was nothing for Benfro, and despite the buckets that had been thrown through the bars, there was no water to drink either. He slumped down against the closed door, thirsty, hungry, but not tired. Most of his days were taken up with sitting in this dreadful cage, either cramped like now or more uncomfortably rocking back and forth as the circus rolled slowly south and east.
‘Another day gone. Goodbye, sweet Arhelion.’
Benfro looked up from his musings. The old dragon spoke to the sunset as the last shimmer of red disappeared. He sounded so sad and lost that Benfro was left wondering how many times he had said the same thing.
‘How long have you been in here?’
‘Magog was always in here. Magog will always be in here. How long is how long?’
Benfro sighed. Getting sense out of the old dragon was like squeezing water out of a stone.
‘But surely there must have been a time when you weren’t caged like this?’
‘This is Cenobus, Magog’s home. Do not call it a cage.’
Benfro remembered the ruins deep in the heart of the great forest of the Ffrydd. It was difficult to decide which was worse: being stuck there under Magog’s control or here under Loghtan’s. At least he didn’t dream here. There must have been something in the drugs he was given that made him sleep soundly. It would have been too much indeed to be caged during the day and forced to sort through the dwindling pile of dragon’s jewels in Magog’s repository through the night.
‘Have you met many other dragons here?’ Memories of his mother, of Sir Frynwy and the other villagers, of Corwen, reminded him of something he had forgotten under the influence of Loghtan’s drugs. A shiver ran down his spine to the tip of his tail as his slow brain followed the logic of it.
‘Magog has seen many dragons. They come to his court for his wisdom.’
‘What about a dragon called Sir Trefaldwyn? Do you remember meeting him?’
The old dragon considered a moment, his rheumy eyes glinting in the failing evening light.
‘No. I knew Palisander, of course. And Albarn the Bard, but no Sir Trefaldwyn. What manner of name is that for a dragon anyway?’
‘How about Morgwm. Morgwm the Green?’ Benfro studied the old dragon’s face for the faintest flicker of recognition. But there was nothing. It was both frustrating and a relief; if this had been the sorry, mad wreck of his father, then what hope was there left?
‘I knew a Morrin the Fool once. But he was no dragon. No, he was an ass, and a fine fellow to boot.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Old Loghtan didn’t like him, so he struck him down with an axe. Then they chopped him up and fed him to us. Very good he tasted too. You should be careful, young Gog. Loghtan doesn’t like you much.’
‘I don’t think he much likes anyone.’
‘Hee. Old Loghtan’s a misery guts. That’s for sure. But you don’t want to upset him. Oh no, sir. That would be bad.’
‘Worse than this?’
‘You think this is bad?’ The old dragon laughed, a noise like pigs fighting in a sack. ‘You don’t know nothing, my boy. You don’t know nothing.’
‘What? We’re locked up in this shit hole for days on end, drugged into submission, made to fly endlessly round and round, whipped … What could be worse than that?’ Benfro’s anger came out in his voice, but he was powerless to lash out, to kick and punch like he wanted to. His body was barely under his control. It took all of his strength just to find a slightly less uncomfortable place to sit.
‘Old Loghtan’s a magician, see.’ The dragon went on as if Benfro had said nothing. ‘He knows things. Oh yes, he does. He can do things to you. Bad things.’
‘Like forcing you to parade in front of some king like a performing animal?’
‘Oh no. Much worse, much worse. He can steal your memories from you.’
The sun was well below the horizon now, and the only light came from its reflection on the few high clouds sitting motionless in the evening sky. Benfro half-listened to the other dragon’s words, responded because there was very little else he could do. His companion was completely mad, and he wondered how long it would take for him to get the same way.
‘How can he steal your memories? Don’t you mean he just makes you forget things?’
In the deepening gloom, Benfro saw the bulk of the other dragon shift, shuffling in a stoop across the wagon to drop beside him. He was smaller than Benfro, withered with age and the treatment he had received at the hands of Loghtan and Tegwin. Benfro wondered how many decades he had been with the circus; how long it had taken for his spirit to be completely broken.
