to return from the hunt and there came a report that he had last been seen heading toward the far hills where there were dragons, I was but a bare-assed learner, running free through the camp, permitted to snatch food from any fire, treated with the sometimes amused but always fond tolerance of all. I mourned for my father, but even then, having been on my first hunt, I had my hardax, and with my father dead, I was the man. I told my mother not to weep, for she had her man. And then the curse came and darkened my skull and nothing that Seer of Things Unseen could do would cause it to go away, and was it grief for my father or shame for me which caused my mother to weaken, to spend her days lying in the hide-house sighing, weeping, and then burning with the fever? I had never had anyone, since then. Life, of course, is God's most precious gift, so even an accursed one was sacred, but there were the taunts from my contemporaries, the laughter behind my back. When it became evident that I was to be different in other ways the shame of it pushed me into myself. I set up my hidehouse, legacy of my father, on the far fringe of the family area, went my solitary way, and in my desperation and unhappiness took chances, bracing the fierce bear, nearly dying in his clutch as his great heart pumped out his life just in time to keep his carnal-smelling maw from closing over my head. Soon, however, they did not taunt me. Although striking a fellow man is punishable, certain games, tests of strength, are encouraged; and soon I was able to handle my peers with an ease which caused mutterings. It was no test at all to pin Logan, or Young Pallas, or even the hulking Yorerie to the ground in a wrestling match. In games of skill and endurance I excelled, running faster than the swiftest, able to trot for endless hours to bring a deer to bay and then, his giant carcass dragging to the ground, to carry the animal back to camp to turn him over to the family of Yorerie the Butcher for preparation and sharing. My longbow was two hands longer than even the longbow of the family head, Strongarm, and only the respect which I owed to our family head prevented me, in hand games, from besting the Strongarm himself. But I was and had always been alone. There was only one bright spot in my life, and that was in the form of a sunny-faced prewoman, Yuree, who, perhaps in pity at first, came to me and talked to me. She was so beautiful, her body short and round and soft, her skull gleaming and oiled, her wide eyes alert as the eyes of a frightened female deer. Even as a child she knew her powers, sending me to the top of the tallest fruit tree to toss down the ripest fruits with no more authority than her smile. «Eban,» I remembered her saying, as I lay behind the rock and let my eyes cover the ground in front of me, counting the bleached piles of bones which, it seemed, grew more numerous further down the slope, «what will you do when I come of age?» «I don't know,» I mumbled, not daring to think that I, the freak, the accursed one, could presume to ask for her. «Oh, you pain me,» she said. «Will you not ask for me?» «Yuree,» I said, finding it hard to breath. «Do I dare think you'd want me to ask?» «Of course, silly,» she said, with a teasing smile. «Not that I promise to choose you.» «It will be honor enough to be allowed to ask,» I said. «But the daughter of the family head could not be pairmate to a haired one.» «Oh, pooh,» she said. «We'll have Seer burn it off.» I wore the blisters for days, after I tried to burn away my curse myself. And now I could feel the summer sun doing it's work on my partially exposed scalp, the hair being by now about a finger long and tawny like the hide of a lion. And was that a noise from below? And so it was only Yuree with whom I could talk, share my shame, my dreams. When she would sneak away from her hidehouse on a spring night and lie in my arms and allow me to touch her lips with mine, to do all those wonderful and blood-rousing things which prepeople are allowed, her skirt or loincloth tucked securely between her legs to mark the only off-bounds area, I dared to think of it, of her in my hidehouse, with me bringing her the spoils of the hunt, for I was, truly, Eban, son of Egan the Hunter. «I will dress you in lion skins,» I said. «Oh, will you?» she breathed, her voice made low and funny by my kisses on her bared torso. «Oh, will you?» «For you I will gather a necklace of dragon guts,» I promised. Ha. I had not remembered that. Was that a sign? So long ago I had promised her. Oh, gods of man, it was. It was a sign. I was the favored one. She had remembered, and the multicolored thing hanging from her father's hidehouse was the sign that it was, actually, unbelievably, Eban who was the favorite. At that moment I was ready to slay two dragons, three dragons, a dozen dragons, to festoon my Yuree in gaudy and lovely guts. And at that moment I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a tawny shape move swiftly from cover to cover. So it was not only the possibility of a dragon before me. There was the lion behind me, having tracked me, stalked me. It was a tight situation. If I moved, the dragon's teeth would come spitting to kill me. If I remained behind the rock, I would end up with four manweights of lion on my back. Keeping in shelter, I strung my finest arrow, tipped in dragonskin, to my bow, put my hardax atop the rock ready for use, rolled to my back so that I could watch. The lion was silent, but I caught a glimpse of him as he moved closer. His intentions were clear. I considered running for it, back up the slope, but he was above me and I was at a disadvantage. The game continued for a long, hot, sweaty period during which the sun moved perceptibly. I listened for sounds from below, for sounds of the dragon. There was nothing. Only the sun and the buzz of insects and the loose rock which rolled down toward me just before the lion coughed, leaped, made his charge, arching high to come down at me from up the slope, his tawny hide shining against the sky. I loosed my best and most deadly arrow and reached for the hardax even as he was airborne, and then he was descending, claws showing from his pads, and my arrow lodged ineffectively in his haunch. In that swift and instant moment of action I wondered if my father had died thus, at the claws and fangs of a lion instead of in a spitting storm of dragon's teeth. So I was to die, mauled and maimed, food for the lion of the mountains. But then there was a terrible sound, even as the lion began his descent, and I saw his body seem to pause in midair and the life run out of him with blood springing from his head, and then I was rolling to keep his vast weight from landing atop me and he was beside me, jerking out his life. A sound such as I'd never heard before, a wail of ghostly anguish, high-pitched, whining, came from below. There was a rumble, a hard clanking sound. Oh, gods of man. I took one moment to make sure the lion was dead. He looked intact, with only his head damaged, pulped, bloody, but the hide excellent with only the one arrow hole in the flank. I retrieved my arrow and lay beside the dead animal, admiring his magnificent coloring, the powerful and now useless muscles, the yellowish and deadly teeth exposed in a death's-head grin. The sound from below came to a halt. From directly below there was the bellow of a dragon's voice, and teeth swept up the slope, making leaves dance and fall and sending a shower of dust into my eyes as they struck against the rock which protected me. More frightened than I'd ever been, I waited for the deadly rain to cease. It was said that very old dragons had long since spit out all their teeth and had only their deadly eyes. This, then, was not one of them, although all dragons are ancient. Silence. I lay there, forcing myself to review everything I'd ever heard around the campfires on the subject of dragons. By the will of God, dragons did not breed. God help man if they did. By the will of God, dragons stayed on their dragon paths, beaten into hardness by the eternity of their vigilance, for dragons were God's first creations, were on earth before God made man from the fresh, red bones of a bear and made him walk upright, as the bear does on occasion. What else did I know? The range of the dragon's teeth is limited, and the teeth cannot penetrate rock or a huge tree. The dragon's eyes are deadly at closer range, but can kill only in line of sight, being deflected by trees, stone or, one old man claimed, by a stout shield of animal hide. Dragons protect. What? Only God knows, but it was said that originally the intention was to keep man from leaving the mountains to enter the deadly flats. So. I was not exactly an authority on dragons, and down there, hidden by the trees, I had me a dragon. The lion had attracted the dragon's attention, and the sounds I'd heard had been the dragon moving to a point directly below me. I thought about that. It seemed to me that it would be best to get out of there and make a new approach. I began to crawl up the hill, keeping very, very low. In an open area the ground around me suddenly spurted dust and there were deadly snaps in the air. I leaped for a rock, and the teeth crashed against it. Then with one leap I was among the trees, and the teeth thudded harmlessly into the tree trunks. I made another approach. I went far to the north and came down. There were no bones of death there. The range of my dragon seemed to be limited. I had a bad moment when I saw, overgrown and ruined, something I'd never seen, a dragon's path, dark and eerie, cut by eons of vigilance into the hillside, flat, wide. I hid and waited. Nothing happened. I moved to a vantage point. To the south along the dragon's path there was a huge rock slide, closing off the path. So, I reasoned, the dragon's northward patrol was ended by the slide. I crept toward it, climbed the chaos of the rocks, peered over. The dragon's path continued, and, oh, gods of man, he was there, to the south an arrow's flight, squat, ancient, awesome. His round head in the middle of his squat body was motionless, but even at that distance I could see the gleam of his fearsome eyes. I held my breath, ready to leap down the rock slide if he saw me and came after me. The path was in better shape on the far side of the rock slide, hard and shiny, with only a few small trees and weeds growing in it. The tracks of the dragon were in the center, and it was well beaten. The path had been cut into the side of solid rock so that a cliff towered above it, ending in a slope of rock topped by the forest. I heard a scream, and the dragon's head turned slowly, the eerie wail creaking into my ears, and then the rumble as he turned and slowly, feet pounding and clanking, came toward me. I lowered myself, peering out between two rocks. He halted halfway to me and went to sleep. There was silence. I studied the land. Below the dragon's path the slope fell away into a deep ravine, from which I could hear the sound of a stream. Among the trees I could catch glimpses of white bones. To the south, beyond the point from which the dragon had spat death upon the lion, there was another rockslide. The dragon was effectively penned into a section of his path not more than an arrow's flight long. «Well, Eban the hunter,» I said, «it is only to kill him now.» How? That was the question. Once, according to legend, a dragon had been killed by rolling burning logs down on him from above, but my father had slain his dragon in a different way. I looked to the cliff which towered above the dragon's path, highest in the center of the remaining range. I made my plans. It was early afternoon, and I wondered if I would do well to wait for darkness. Could dragons see in the night? We knew so little about them. Yes, I would await the coming of night. I withdrew, walking fearfully along the abandoned portions of the dragon's path, and made my camp, dined on dried meat and fruits, slept well in spite of what I faced. I awoke, willing myself to do so, with the moon not yet above the hills, and in an almost inky darkness, I made my way to the top of the cliff. The dragon was a dark and foreboding blackness down below. I began to gather rocks, hefting stones as large as I could handle, rolling some into place. Once I dislodged a loose stone and sent it clanking and crashing downward, and the area near me was lit, suddenly, by the fierceness of the dragon's eye, a blinding blaze of light as if from the sun which, as I cowered back into the forest, swept back and forth and then went away. When the sun sent its warning of morning in the form of false dawn, I had a pile of rocks higher than my head. My hope was that once I dislodged them, pulling away the small log on which they all rested, they would gather their brothers as they rolled down the slope in a growing slide which would bury the dragon and make him immobile. I waited until the light was good, and it was almost my undoing. For as I readied myself, the dragon, who had been in perfect position, moved, first making that eerie scream, then jerking into motion, his peculiar feet making clanking sounds on the pathway which he had beaten down into hardness with his eons of patrol. He went to the far south and paused. I waited for an hour and was impatient. I steeled myself and stepped out to the brink of the cliff and stood there, my body exposed. Nothing happened. Had he expended his teeth? If so, he still had his eyes. I knew that from the incident of the night. But he had to be moved back to the center of the cliff to be a target for my manmade rock slide. «Dragon,» I said softly. «Come to me. Be a nice dragon and come to be killed.» He didn't hear. «Dragon,» I yelled. Creak. Clank. I dived for the trees as teeth spattered around me. Well, I had his attention. I could hear him now, clanking, pounding the hard path. He halted below me, and I dared look out. Teeth thudded into the trees above me. And then I saw his eye, the one looking toward me, glow. A lance of fire shot out, bright, hurting my eyes, searing the trees only hands above my head. I tried to dig myself a hole. Yes, I had his attention. But he was not quite in the proper position. I examined him. His tough skin, parts of which would be so wonderful for making hardaxes and other tools, was bleeding. All old dragons—and all were old—bled, their dark blood seeping through the tough skin to redden and blotch. This, I felt, in spite of his supply of teeth, which seemed to be endless, was a very old dragon, blood-spotted almost everywhere except in his gleaming eyes. I wanted him to move. I threw a branch, and a lance of fire caught it in midair, and he moved, just as I wanted him to. Dragons, I decided, were not too smart. He was directly below my pile of rocks, and I rolled quickly, kicked the log, and it went bounding down the cliff, followed by a growing rumble as my rock pile fell and, as I'd hoped, gathered force and went sweeping down in a cloud of dust and a rumble like summer thunder. And over it there was the creaking and clanking as the dragon tried to avoid the oncoming mass. I watched, fascinated and praying to my gods, and then the first stones were upon him, making hard sounds as they glanced off his hard skin, and then the force of it hit him and I saw him tilt and I heard the rattle of his teeth flying everywhere with his eyes flashing and then he was going over and the rocks piled up on him, crushing him, imprisoning even his huge strength under many, many manweights of rock and dirt. All was silent. The echo of the roar of the landslide faded. I waited. Then, heart in mouth, I began to make my way down the fresh dirt and exposed stones of the cliff, and I lived, did not feel the blasting shock of his teeth or the searing flame of his eyes. He was almost completely covered. He was on his side, and even in his extremity he tried to kill me, sending out his teeth, rattling them against the stones which covered him, blasting and smoking the stones with the force of his eyes. I waited and watched his death struggles, and it was half the day before he ceased to try to burn his way out of the pile of rubble with his eyes. The rocks were hot to the touch, and I had to wait for them to cool. Finally, in the early evening, I neared, coming up on his weak side, his exposed belly. He spat one last burst of teeth and then was silent. By nightfall, I had his belly exposed, being careful not to move the rocks which kept his head from turning. His huge, flat, continuous feet were moving slowly, grinding away at nothing. I was careful to avoid them. I kept remembering little things. «The dragon's belly is his weakest part,» my father