Dragon Rescue Page 4

  He did what he could to make the stranger comfortable in the bunk. The wounded man gasped for water and the ship’s boy brought a mug and held it to his lips.

  “Easy! You’ll choke him if you give it to him too fast!” his captain snapped. “Cover him with plenty of warm blankets and stay by him.

  Tell me if he comes to and wants to talk.”

  “None of the lakeshore fishermen I ever met,” said an older member of Felicity’s crew. “Strange cast to his features, too.”

  “I can see!” growled Trover, turning to return to deck. “Keep a close eye on him, boy! Yell if he comes to enough to talk.”

  On deck he hailed the nearest blockade ship.

  “A Northlander, or I miss me guess! We’ll take him back to Lakehead,” he explained when she closed on the Felicity. “Keep an eye out for more stray boats, Fellish! I’ll be back after dawn, I judge.”

  “Who is he?” Fellish wanted to know.

  “Not sure. Looks like he might be one of them Rellings the bailiff spoke about!” replied Trover. “Wounded close to death!”

  He turned his eyes inboard. “Hands to the sheets! Prepare to go about! Helmsman, port tack for Lakehead! Hop to it! He’s in a bad way, or I’m no judge, whoever or whatever he might be, poor soul! May not live to see the bailiffs gaol!”

  Chapter Three

  Call to Arms

  The ten-day overland journey from Hidden Lake Canyon to Overhall was pleasant, especially in this early fall of the year when dry southerly winds alternated with sudden light showers and cool gusts off the distant Quietness.

  At first Tom and Manda rode along the east-west range of the Snow Mountains, enjoying the spectacular, scenery of snowcapped peaks on one hand and flat, featureless desert on the other. Riding at a relaxed pace by day and camping out at night were rather pleasant, a change from the hard work of beginning a house in the canyon.

  When they had reached a point several days’ ride to the east of Hidden Lake Canyon, the land began to roll gently and the yearly rainfall there was sufficient to encourage lush grasslands but very few trees. This was the western edge of Murdan’s Ramhold, and his huge flocks of sheep grazed here in the winter and spring before summer dried the water holes and springs, and the rams and their ewes had to be herded up into the foothills to the north for yeaning, to spend the summer and early-fall days.

  The grasslands were not quite as empty as they seemed. Every day or so the travelers came to upwelling springs, many of which had fostered the growth of prosperous ranches and even a few villages.

  This broad, fertile land was the bread basket of Carolna. Seemingly endless grasslands became seemingly endless fields of wheat, oats, corn, and barley and pasturelands for horses and fat cattle.

  The Librarian’s party overtook and passed long trains of wagons being hauled by teams of stoic oxen, down to the Cristol River, where the wheat and barley would be ground at water-driven mills, bagged, and shipped by flour barges east to Head of Navigation, a day or so south of Overhall and west of Lakehead.

  From there the cargoes were carried by ox train over the shallow divide to Lakeheart Lake, and transhipped another time into sturdy lake barges for the next leg—to the more populous east. Much of the wealth of the powerful Gantrell family had come from controlling this trade and its traffic, Manda explained to Tom.

  Like the loads of milled flour, Tom and Manda were carried the middle third of their journey up the slow, winding Cristol. The river barges, driven by the steady autumnal westerlies, were quite comfortable and roomy.

  Their fellow passengers were a varied lot; hardworking smallholders on their way to the eastern cities with their wives, children, and servants to sell their grain, buy seed, purchase new clothing and winter supplies, and see the sights; commercial travelers returning east to restock their trade goods and report to their employers a successful summer; an occasional circuit court justice and attendant cloud of lawyers and clerks excitedly looking forward to the Fall Sessions at Lexor.

  If not the men, their wives immediately recognized Princess Alix Amanda and made much of her presence. Tom talked to their husbands about farming and building houses in the west, while Manda was told how to raise chickens, cows, and children so far from the amenities of castles and cities.

  Evenings were filled with music—many of the travelers brought fiddles and harps and flutes along for just this time—and stories and news. The barge crews furnished plain but plentiful food and drink.

  In this way, the long days of early fall aboard a river barge were pleasant and never lonesome.

  At the confluence of the Cristol and its largest tributary, Overhall Stream, Tom and Manda had their horses and sumpter mules un-loaded from the livestock pens on the foredeck, saddled, and reloaded in a grove of ancient riverside willows, and rode up Overhall Vale to the Historian’s tall castle, by far the most pleasant part of their long journey.

  On every hand Overhall tenants and neighboring freehold farmers stopped their late-summertime work to come to the roadside to greet the Princess and her consort. The young couple was known everywhere, but nowhere more cordially greeted than here, near Murdan’s home Achievement.

  The countryfolk well remembered the capture of Overhall by the Mercenary Knights, the fight against Lord Peter of Gantrell, and the victorious return of their lord after Gantrell had at last been forced to flee into exile.

  “We could swing around to Ffallmar Farm and spend a day or two with Rosemary and her family,” suggested Manda.

  She’d been the only woman in Hidden Lake Canyon all summer long—the rest being menservants, surveyors, and young second-sons who had been selected by Tom and Manda to work his new Achievement.

  “I miss Mornie, too,” she admitted wistfully. “I wonder how she fared in Broken Land this season!”

  “You’re travel weary as it is,” protested her husband. “But if you really want to take the extra time...”

  Tom was an indulgent husband. Fortunately, Manda was an inde-pendent woman who seldom took advantage of his good nature.

  “No, no!” she said with a sudden brilliant smile, “I still am a city and castle girl, you know. I’ll be happiest when we ride into Overhall’s front gate once again. Besides, you must report to your employer.

  Murdan’ll be impatient to hear how we’ve fared out in the wilderness.”

  Tom urged his mare to a gallop, leaving the mules to follow at their own pace. Manda followed Tom. They rode swiftly along Overhall Stream until they started up the greensward hill leading up to the Overhall foregate.

  Pulling his horse down to a walk again, Tom said, “Well, in a few more summers and winters, we’ll have a place as populous and pleasant as Overhall, all our own. Well, maybe not quite as populous.”

  “I know that!” his wife said with a laugh. “I’ve absolutely no com-plaints, really! I’ve enjoyed our summer at Hidden Lake as much as any I can remember—and I’m ever so old, you know.”

  They had been seen and recognized coming up the vale, and by the time they rode through the barbican gate, across Gugglerun Draw, and through the wide-open inner gate, a crowd had filled the outer bailey, shouting their welcome.

  Murdan was in their midst, beaming broadly behind his full black beard. With him stood his daughter Rosemary and her three young children, waiting for them to dismount so they could engulf the arrivals with their love and joy.

  “I do like homecomings!” cried the Historian, stepping back so others could salute the Librarian and his beautiful Princess. “We’ve laid on a real Overhall dinner party for tonight, after you’ve rested and washed up and gotten settled in.”

  “I can start right now!” exclaimed Manda, forgetting her travel weariness at once. “Oh, Rosemary! I was just now saying how much I missed you. Next summer you really must bring the children to Hidden Lake for a long stay. It’s well worth the journey!”

  Rosemary’s youngest, Eduard of Ffallmar, jumped up and down with excitement at the thought.

>   “Will I see rattlesnakes? Will I ride on a riverboat?”

  “Eddie,” cried one of his sisters in the matter-of-fact exasperation common to all older sisters, “you’ve seen mountains before! And the ocean, too. Remember when we were stolen away to Wall?”

  “But that,” said Eddie, just as a matter of fact, “was years and years ago. Now I can ride a horse as well as anyone.”

  Tom settled the matter for the moment by asking Eduard and his sisters to lead their sweaty horses up to the stables under Aftertower and make sure they were rubbed down, watered, and fed a heaping measure of oats with brown sugar in reward for being so good as to carry their riders a thousand miles with not a bit of trouble, not even a lost shoe.

  “All goes well beside Hidden Lake, then?” asked Murdan of them both.

  He led them into his Great Hall at the bottom of Middletower, where a light lunch—three tables filled with it—had been whipped up by Mistress Grumble, Murdan’s capable housekeeper, on very short notice.

  “We got all the lines and angles measured and staked out and the elevations figured,” Tom told him eagerly. “Retruance can begin designing the house and the grounds, now that we have the proper figures. If all goes well, we should be able to start some construction with the new year.”

  “Do you still not intend to build curtain walls about your castle?”

  asked Graham, Murdan’s Captain of the Overhall Guards.

  The old soldier thought all great houses should have thick stone walls and tall watchtowers and deep moats, all the crenellated defensives of his beloved Overhall.

  “No walls, except for flowers to climb upon!” said Tom positively.

  “What use? The only way for an enemy to reach us will be either up the canyon, where ten men could hold off an army of a thousand...or drop straight down almost a thousand feet from the rim. Manda thought of putting up towers, as towers are elegant, but Retruance and I talked her out of it.”

  “Towers,” admitted his Princess, “would look not just strange but downright silly in our canyon, I suppose. The tallest would reach no more than a third the way to the rim.”

  “You’re right, of course,” admitted Graham, giving up.

  He piled thinly sliced red roast beef slices on a slab of dark, seeded rye bread and slathered the whole with a generous dollop of hot brown mustard. “Still...”

  “Have you heard anything from Retruance and Furbetrance?” Tom asked, turning to face the Historian. “They’ve been gone for almost four months now.”

  “How well I know it!” sighed Murdan. “I’d never admit it to your good Dragon Mount, but I miss Retruance and his brother almost as much as I’ve missed their father. A Companion without a Dragon is only part a whole elf, as the saying goes.”

  “Oh? I never heard that one,” Manda said, laughing. She was doing her best to surround a steaming meat pasty filled with tomatoes, onions, and hot peppers.

  “Ho? I can’t imagine why not,” said the Historian with an innocent smile. “I made it up myself, not long ago.”

  “Say, thirty seconds ago?” Manda teased.

  Murdan wrinkled his nose at the Princess but said to Tom, “No, no word as yet. Not that I expected any this soon. I did hear from Hetabelle, however. She said that the boys headed south into Isthmusi.”

  “Well, they’ve tried every other direction,” said Tom. “They’ll have fine tales to tell when they do return.”

  Once at Overhall it was easy to fall into the familiar routine of the Historian’s castle. Tom spent his mornings supervising his own staff, gathered to arrange and care for Murdan’s vast personal library, his official papers, and the seemingly endless and entirely muddled papers of the late architect-Dragon Altruance, the builder of Overhall Castle.

  “There are some files missing, sir,” said his chief assistant, a bright lad from Sprend, a village a half day’s walk toward Ffallmar Farm and Lakehead. ‘They appear to deal with tunnels and passages that aren’t there, whatever that means.”

  “Make a note to ask Retruance about them,” answered the Librarian. “I’ve long suspected that good old Altruance built some secrets into these walls. His grandson may have some ideas where the notes got off to.”

  Manda, as a Princess and a member of the Royal Family of Carolna, mistress of a number of important and valuable properties, threw herself into their administrative details and related social matters.

  She was assisted by her own staff of butlers, majordomos, and factors, but mostly by a dour middle-aged woman named Mistress Plume.

  “Have you ever heard any more from Plume?” Manda asked the woman.

  “No, thank goodness!” the fugitive’s wife said with some heat. “Nor do I ever wish to.”

  “I think you’re right, I must admit,” the Princess said with a sigh.

  Mistress Plume’s acid and arid little husband had proved a spy and a traitor within Overhall in the pay of Lord Peter of Gantrell, Manda’s wicked and ambitious uncle. He’d disappeared into the far Northland of the Relling nomads, following Lord Peter into exile four years before.

  Mistress Plume was neither glum nor acid, and Manda was very fond of her. The secretary now took a fat sheaf of papers and began to sort through them, telling Manda of their subjects as she riffled.

  “You’ve been asked to sponsor the Fall Sessions Ball,” she noted.

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “No, but I knew Father was going to ask. When I was Princess Royal all I had to do was go to the ball. Now that I’m just an ordinary married Princess, I have to work at it.”

  But she loved such doings and came to her bed each night still elated and happy with her daily tasks.

  Murdan was already preparing to go to Fall Sessions, still two months off, and that called for a series of social events at Overhall as he gathered his delegates, wined and dined Small Achievement neighbors, and planned petitions and political strategems.

  He had, at last, hired a new secretary of his own—a young, rather serious and scholarly young man named Flaretty—and spent long hours closeted with him in his Foretower office dictating letters and drawing up memoranda by the ream.

  But in all this confusion of preparation there was time and op-portunity to ride off to a shucking bee or a harvest fair at this or that nearby Achievement or tenant holding. The Lord of Overhall was expected to make an appearance at each gala affair marking the end of another good growing and harvesting season.

  The three of them, accompanied by Flaretty, rode down to Ffallmar Farm to escort Murdan’s daughter and her lively three children back to Ffallmar, Rosemary’s farmer husband, a prosperous, honest and thoroughly delightful man.

  As they neared the Ffallmar Farm gate, they were met by Ffallmar himself, bluff, ruddy, and solid, accompanied by three officers of the Royal Courier Service in their orange-and-brown uniforms and tall plumed hats.

  It was said their uniforms had been designed by the King himself, in colors and plumes that made a Royal Courier easy to spot, even at a great distance.

  “Hello and most welcome home!” shouted Ffallmar as they approached the gate. “Most welcome home, sweetest wife! Obedient and loving offspring!”

  Rosemary leaned out of her saddle—she rode astride, not in the new-fashioned sidesaddle manner that ladies of fashion were recommending to accommodate the season’s longer, tighter skirts—and gave her man a fierce hug and a long kiss, although they’d not been apart for more than a month.

  “Manda, my beloved!” cried Ffallmar. “And good old Tom Librarian! So glad you’re back from the far wilderness. Wonderful to see you, Murdan, my liege!”

  “We’ve been eagerly looking forward to seeing you, your farm, and Rosemary’s home-cooked meals,” laughed Tom, shaking the farmer warmly by the hand.

  Murdan and Ffallmar slapped shoulders, Manda gave the farmer a kiss and a hug, but they were distracted by the presence of the three Royal Couriers.

  “We do have important words for you from Lexor,” admi
tted their senior officer to Murdan as soon as the greeting had quieted down a mite. “It can wait a short while, Lord Historian, until you are dismounted. But not much longer. It is urgent!”

  “Lead the way to the house, son-in-law,” Murdan commanded Ffallmar.

  There were farm lads and lasses lining the long, elm-shaded drive to greet them. A bouquet of huge chrysanthemums in brilliant reds and golds were presented to Manda—the traditional Ffallmar greeting to a visiting member of the Royal Family.

  “We can’t disappoint them,” apologized Manda to Murdan. “Tom and I will look at the new piglets and the colts, as they’ve planned for us. You go ahead to the house and hear what news comes from Father.”

  Murdan nodded silently and gestured to the Courier officers and Ffallmar to follow him. They dismounted and climbed three stone steps onto the wide front veranda of the wide, rambling Ffallmar House, where they could talk in private comfort.

  Manda and Tom went off, dragged almost bodily by Eddie and his sisters, Valerie and Molly, and followed by the farm men and maidens, all dressed in their very best for the occasion.

  ‘‘Come see my new horse!” cried Eddie. “No, not a pony! I love old Patch to death, but in a year, Papa says, my feet’ll be dragging in the farmyard dirt when I ride her. So he gave me a real, full-sized horse.

  Her name is Challenger.”

  Listening to the children’s excited babble and truly admiring the farm buildings, barns, stables, coops, sheds, tall silos, deep cellars, and the broad fields all around, the young couple spent a congenial two hours, hoping and planning someday to do almost as well in Hidden Lake Canyon.

  They returned to the manor house at last, glowing with pleasure, a bit dusty, with wisps of golden wheat straw adhering here and there to their clothing, somewhat out of breath and rather sweaty from all the running about.

  The Royal Courier Service officers were more relaxed, having loosened their gold-frogged jackets and put off their extra-tall plumed bon-nets to take a glass of cider, cool from Rosemary’s icehouse.

  Murdan looked distracted. As soon as it was polite to do so, he drew Manda and Tom aside and showed them the letter brought by the Couriers.