“You're not just hunting it. You think it's hunting you.”
A long silence. Juoth got up and brought over more wood and cleaned it with the handax and set it on the fire. Moved it and rolled it when it wouldn't catch. Until it did at last, with the heavy wet smoke as it dried and then the thin smoke as it burned.
“It's not hunting me,” Brack said. “I said it before and it's still true. It's toying with me. Some damned game.”
“How so?”
“Did my grandfather tell you about it?”
Juoth shook his head. “I knew what he was doing. In a general sense. But did he tell me about this dragon? No.”
“Two hundred years ago,” Brack said. “My grandfather's grandfather's father
came down into the grass plains and stood with the fall wheat blowing about him and the smell of it warm and dry on the wind and everywhere the smell of smoke. He stood with the long bow in one hand and the arrow in the other and the sword at his back and tasted the air. The beast nowhere to be seen but also everywhere and he knew it would come. It must. In the far distance the caravan moving out of the burning town and in the center of this field the crypt with the old man's gold and bones and all about the dead horses. Three of them with their bodies quartered and the blood splashed over the crypt and the smell of that blood as thick and heavy as the smoke.
He saw first the shadow moving over the earth, running along through the grass as a ship over the choppy sea. He turned and looked and then it was gone, darting from sight. This beast so huge and still nimble, especially when in the air that it owned. And also which owned it. He moved toward the crypt and he kept the bow up and then that shadow returned and then he saw it.
Dark and long in the air, flashing down with the wings spread wide. Muscles gleaming and slick in places with blood not its own. The eyes like fire itself above a jaw powerful enough to snap a horse in two, clean through hide and bone. It came down toward him and shrieked and there was no other sound in the world.
This the call it had made as it drug itself from the furnaces below and stepped for the first time into the night air.
He knew he could not kill it with the bow but he did not mean to kill it that way and he brought it up and loosed an arrow. The distance far too great, but the dragon closing. The arrow falling away beneath.
Looking down and seeing the stone crypt, just steps away now. He ran forward and got behind it and the dragon went close over his head and it felt as if the air split. The way it felt when lightning struck the ground and everything ripped. The sound of one claw dragging hard across the top of the crypt.
And then he was up and climbing over and not even looking at the dragon. For he had seen dragons before and he would see them again. The stone too smooth and his hands and feet slipping. But he pulled himself up and over to the other side and stood on the ledge where he could rise and shoot or drop behind as he needed.
Both in their time.
The dragon shrieked again, furious at the miss, and wheeled in the sky. It turned like a sail into a headwind, one wing billowing as it brought its body around, legs trailing and swinging, the neck arching and curving sharply back as if it were where the dragon wanted to be and the rest of its powerful form was a hinderance.
He watched it turn. Swallowing once and tasting the dust on the back of his throat. Looking at it for the weakness and finding it.
For everything had a weakness. In chariots it was the spokes of the wheels, in horsemen their very mounts. In footsoldiers their heavy armor, also their life. In kings their greed.
In dragons it was the eyes.
The beast came back again and he loosed another arrow and watched the dark shaft fly to its peak and then begin to fall, whistling in the air, and then the dragon lashed out with its teeth and tore it from that air, snapping it in half like a twig beneath a heel. Letting the pieces fall from its jaws to spin back to the earth. Never looking away through all of this, never blinking.
He threw himself from the top of the crypt and behind the wall, and fire washed over. He could feel his shirt aflame and he rolled and pressed it to the stone and the very stone was hot. Like that of a stove. He laid down and the flames on him went out and he could feel his back naked and blistered and raw.
The dragon swept by again and he repeated the earlier escape and hauled himself up and over the crypt while it turned. The stone on the far side partially melted and blisters now also on his hands as he slid over the side. The pain barely felt. For when death was so close pain was nothing and he'd never felt much pain in his long life.
Until later. He always felt it later and the next day in the clutches of hell itself. But now there was nothing but the bow and the dragon and those eyes, and his body would do as it must until it fell.
It came back at him again and he saw it for the arrogance that it was. This repetition. It did not believe it would lose or could be killed and so it would do the same thing until all others were dead, as it had all its life. For it could not fathom an outcome other. It rose up on those black wings and drew its feet up and threw itself at him.
And again he waited just that much longer. As the range closed and he thought he could feel the dragon's heat pouring from its body as it came and he knew he couldn't but still felt that he did. The rushing wind from those wings. It opened its gaping jaws again and shrieked like a demon tearing all sound from the world and the fire swelled in those lungs and he brought the bow up and unleashed the final arrow.
At this distance, closing instantly. Just a flash of wood and metal in the firelight, too fast to follow, and then burying itself in the dragon's eye.
The beast fell and crashed to the earth and rolled in a tangle of wings and legs and claws and scales. Calling again now but in pain and shock and terror. The head rising up and burning blood spraying from the ruptured eye in a scalding torrent and running down that long serpent's neck. The jaws working open and closed and the dragon struggling to gets its legs under it and its wings above.
He leapt from behind the crypt and tore his sword free and brought it around in front of him and ran at it. Perhaps in folly or courage, and sometimes he thought they were the same. But this was the one chance and the dragon would not be so foolish and arrogant again and he could not let it rise.
Now he did feel the heat of the thing and it was like running into a parched desert and everywhere the wheat was burning. A line of ruin behind where the dragon had fallen and the rest of the field now taking up. Smoke and flame and dust in the air. The dragon's calls and the cracking of those jaws.
He came around at it and went to the side where the eye still bled. The dragon had struggled over in the torn earth and was trying to stand and it got one wing up with the other trapped and in doing so killed itself as surely as it had by taking a third pass and not circling to come from the west. The wing rose and it could not see him and he saw the open place below with the skin soft and free of scales. Just a long thin line, a crease where the flesh must move freely as the wings beat, and in this the dragon's end.