Rescue
#4 of Original Stories
A knight rides down a dusty road. A girl waits unwillingly on a hilltop. A dragon circles overhead. These three come together in a short story that's a little darker than what's come before.
Not porn. Warning for violence, death, and rape.
This is part of a series I've been working on about the classic characters of dragon, maiden, and knight, and the different ways in which they can interact.
The road was dusty. Most roads were, when they weren't muddy or snowed over. The horse, tall and heavy and ugly, moved down it at a steady pace. Dust dry, or swampy and wet, or frozen solid, it was all the same to him, his huge feet moved forward without pause. The horse wore a light coat of armor. There was nothing along this dusty road to require such, to either side spread nothing more threatening than golden wheat fields, nearly ready for harvest. But there was no pack horse to bear it, and often there was no time to don it before battle would be joined, so the horse wore it always. He was so large he hardly noticed.
The knight on his back was built to a similar scale. And he was similarly clad in steel. At his side he bore a sword and a lance rested in a cup next to his stirrup. He might have been a noble sight, but his surcoat was dark with dirt and soot, and his armor was stained here and there with rust, as was the armor of his horse. His helmet was unadorned, though once long ago it had borne a colorful plume. That had long since been lost to time and battles. He cared nothing for appearances, he cared only for how well his armor protected him. He had no need to look like he was on parade. Cheering crowds would never greet him; those townsmen and villagers who knew who and what he was would be more likely to call him a bad omen and hurry him out of town, though none would dare give any direct insult to him. He was on the King's business, and a very vital business it was. But it was also a grim business, and he was a grim man to match. His rough-chiseled features were set in hard lines that spoke of bitterness and harsh determination.
He patted the shoulder of his horse. "Just a few more days, boy." The horse didn't reply. The knight sighed. "A few more days. And I hope to God that this is one of the easy ones."
It was cold on the hilltop. It would have been cold now that the sun had set even if she had been wearing her usual practical dress of sturdy wool, but the flimsy white linen that the girl had been dressed in was no protection at all from the cold. It was somebody's summer dress, she was sure. Probably the only white dress in the village, and it fitted her ill. She almost wanted to laugh, or perhaps cry, at the absurdity of it. Nothing had been said about being clad in white. Nothing had been said about virginity, even! But the villagers had heard stories, and so here she was, the only virgin of age in the village, dressed in white, tied to a tree, half frozen on the barren hilltop. She was not quite slender, not quite stocky, somewhere in the nebulous ground between child and matron, just come of age but not grown plump from child-bearing. Her hair and eyes were both brown, and her skin showed fair where the too-large dress was slipping off of her shoulders, but it was tanned brown on her face and forearms.
The cut of her dress was not the foremost thing on her mind now though. Nor was the growing chill, though her skin was covered in goosebumps. Every ounce of her attention was directed towards trying to free herself. She worked without panic, panic has run its course in the first hour, now she was methodical, slowly squirming, working the ropes that bound her to the dead tree lower by tiny fractions. She judged she needed less than an hour more to free herself. Surely she would have enough time! Surely!
High above the struggling girl that same chill night air rushed over the wings of the dragon. He smiled a cold, sharp smile, to see the pale white form tied to the tree below.
"So, the villagers have given in at last," he murmured softly to himself, the sound lost in the roar of wind over his wings. His smile broadened and he swooped down out of the darkness to land in a thunder of wings.
She didn't scream. He had expected her to, but she did not. She simply stood there, staring at him helplessly. He was large, though not as large as she had perhaps been expecting. From where his hooved hind feet rested amid the dead autumn grass to the top of his horned head was perhaps ten feet. He stood upright, like a man, and his forelimbs were human-like also, with five-fingered hands tipped in long, sharp claws. His teeth were sharp too, and startlingly white when he opened his mouth and ran a pink tongue over them. The rest of him was dark, a color that was not quite any color. Muddy brown with a touch of blue and green, but so dark as to be nearly black, it was not a beautiful color, and he was not a beautiful creature. Though he was not exactly ugly either. There was a certain rough grace to his appearance. His face was equine, though with a predator's forward-facing golden eyes, that might have been the eyes of a wolf. Indeed he seemed to be made up of the parts of other animals. A horse's mane ran down his neck, falling about his shoulders, and his hooves were horse's hooves. But the horns that crowned his head were the horns of a bull, and his rough skin was that of a monitor lizard, pebbled rather than scaly.
The girl tried to press herself back into the tree, fear showing clearly in her wide eyes. The dragon smiled at her. He had expected screams, but this mute terror was just as good, really. He reached out, and his claws cut through the ropes, freeing the girl. But she wasn't really free, for before she could move the dragon's hands were on her, grabbing her, pulling her away from the tree, to him. He wrapped her in a harsh embrace and she could feel the texture of his scales against her, the warmth of his body. She shuddered at it, and shuddered more to smell the sulfur-carrion scent of him. She struggled, but his arms were tight around her and she could feel the prick of his claws, warning her not to fight.
And then suddenly they were aloft, the dragon leaping into the air with a lurch, the girl letting out a small shriek and ceasing her struggles. She held still, trying not to breathe, as the dragon bore her up into the sky, away from the hilltop, away from the village beyond, away from everything she had ever known.
The cave was dark, and damp. It was warmer than the hilltop had been, but it was a musty, dank warmth, like the warmth of a rotten garbage heap. It smelled strongly of dragon, that sulfur-carrion smell. Though the dragon couldn't possibly have been living there for long, still the scent seemed to permeate everything. Or maybe it was only the girl, the scent of him clinging to her clothes even after he had put her down. She curled up in the center of the chamber, huddled in a ball of miserable fear. She had still said nothing. What was there to say? The only question in her mind was which of the rumors she had heard was the truth, and she could not bring herself to ask the dragon, the monster, whether he would ear her or... or do that other, possibly worse thing.
The dragon settled himself across the entrance, lying on his side with his wings folded against his back. He smiled at her again and she shivered and looked away. Something about that smile was disquieting.
"Welcome to my home," the dragon said. His voice was not a human voice. It was harsher, more sibilant. "I am very pleased that you are here. Very pleased indeed. It is always a pleasure to have a human visit. We dragons owe you so much, you know."
The girl didn't respond.
The dragon laughed. It was a cold laugh, containing no true mirth. It was the laugh of a cruel little boy pulling the wings off flies, the laugh of someone who enjoys the pain and suffering of others. "Yes, we owe you a great deal. Were it not for you, for the human blood mingled with ours, we would still be mere animals. But you, you gave us the gift of intelligence. We can choose now, each generation, how we will mate, what manner of creature will bear our sons. And while sometimes we renew our strength by bringing the animal blood back into our line, we frequently choose to renew our wisdom with you. My father gave me a horse's strength, but my sons, our sons, will have your wisdom, my mate."
He moved forward then, going easily on all fours across the chamber. The girl whimpered. She knew now the answer to the question she hadn't dared ask.
The dragon stretched out his clawed hands and with a kind of harsh delicacy he shredded the white dress, ripping it from her without so much as touching her skin. Those hands closed on her shoulders, his grip careful but impossibly strong, and pushed her relentlessly back, pinning her to the floor. Her wide, terrified eyes stared up at the looming bulk of the dragon, and his crimson eyes gazed down on her, taking in the fairness of her skin, the roundness of her breasts, and the dark mound between her legs. He ran his pink, wet tongue over his teeth again as he grinned down at her.
Then he lowered himself, his bulk pressing down on her.
And now at last she screamed, as she had not on the hilltop, as she had not when he brought her to his cave. Screamed with horror and despair that filled her as the dragon filled her. She struggled also, fighting and writhing beneath him, her cries growing louder and more filled with pain.
The dragon only smiled more broadly.
The knight still sat slumped as his horse carried him in among the houses. He had reached his destination, but arrival brought no lifting of his spirit. He had hoped that things would be simple, easy, that he could just kill a dragon and go on his way, but the signs were bad. Very bad. The fields around the village were patched with burnt black. This was no false alarm, a dragon had been here. But none of them smoked. They were all old, the newest looked to have been burned weeks ago. And he knew better than to hope that the dragon had simply moved on.
There were people in the fields, harvesting what was left of their crops. They looked away from him as he rode by.
At the center of the village he found the mayor, waiting for him. He was just another farmer, this place was not large enough to need or to support a politician. He glared at the knight with a defensive sort of anger.
"You gave it a girl." The knight didn't bother with politeness, with introductions or greetings.
"We had to! The crops..."
"Your taxes will be doubled this year."
"What?! But we have hardly half the harvest we should. We can't possibly afford..."
"Your taxes will be doubled," repeated the knight. "You knew the consequences when you chose to give in to the creature's demands."
"But surely... surely the loss of one girl's life isn't worth such a punishment?"
The knight paused, taking in what the mayor had said. "You don't know, then."
"Don't know what?"
"Why it is that dragons ask for maidens." The knight's expression was bitter. "Tell me, how long ago did you give her to the dragon?"
"We... uh... two weeks."
"In five more weeks, had I not come, you would suddenly be dealing with a dozen dragons. Young, stupid, smaller than their parent, but fast, vicious, and hungry. They would eat all your livestock, and you as well. By year's end there would be nothing left here at all."
"But I don't understand. It's just one dragon. What does letting it eat a village girl have to do with it breeding more?"
The knight stared down at the mayor, the farmer, and tried to keep contempt off of his face. It was not this man's fault that he was uneducated, ignorant. But the consequences of that ignorance... Finally the knight shook his head and touched his heels to his horse's sides. He knew how to follow the signs, so he didn't need to ask any further questions. The villagers didn't want to hear the explanations he had, and he didn't want to make them. He just wanted to get the coming ordeal over with.
The mayor opened his mouth as if to call after him, then closed it again and just stood there, watching the knight ride out of the village, towards the hills where the dragon laired. A small crowd had all gathered, and they stared now at the place where surely a grand battle was shortly to take place.
The knight quickly vanished from view. The hills were rocky, with only a few scrubby trees here and there, so the watching peasants saw him appear and disappear several times and he made his way over and around them.
Eventually he vanished completely from sight.
Some time passed. A few people grew bored and left, but most stayed, staring into the hills.
Their patience was rewarded eventually with a distant roar. Faintly they could hear a clash, as of steel against scale, and the crackling whoosh of dragon's fire. The dragon's shape appeared in the sky, a distant sketch of wings and tail. It rose, then dived, and there was another roar. Then a third, louder bellowing, accompanied by clangs and crashes.
Then silence.
They waited again, but five minutes passed, then ten, then half an hour, and finally it was clear that neither dragon nor knight would be visiting their town again.
The dragon's carcass steamed, though the air was not cold. But its innards were filled with fire, and that heat would take time to fade.
The knight wiped his sword clean on the creature's horse-like mane, then mounted his horse again. The easy part was finished. Now... now came the hard part.
Slowly the pair, knight and horse, passed the cooling corpse and picked their way along the narrow valley to the entrance of the dragon's cave. The horse stopped outside the gaping blackness. The knight dismounted. He stood in the entrance for a long time, then sighed and stepped in.
The cave was a simple one, just a single chamber with a narrow entry only just big enough for the creature that had once dwelt there. Enough light came in from outside that the knight needed no torch.
The girl was huddled against the far wall, curled up around the growing mass of her stomach. She looked up when the knight came in, and her eyes were full of pain.
He walked over and knelt beside her. "The dragon is dead." he said softly.
"Good," she said, and there was a touch of fierceness to the word.
The knight looked at her. He never knew what to say, how to explain what must come next. But the pain in her eyes told him she knew enough to not expect a fairy-tale rescue. She reached out to him, her slender hand, marred by grime and dust, taking his calloused one. "Please," she said quietly, and with bravery enough to bring tears to his eyes, "Please, is there... is there a way to be rid of them? I feel them now, sometimes, gnawing inside me. It hurts. It hurts more every day. They will eat me up and come out soon, I know. Is there...?"
He had to look away from her, and he wished he could shut out her plea. He had only one word to give her in return. "No." And then, "I'm sorry."
She closed her eyes, fighting back tears. She had cried enough for a lifetime these past weeks. She would not cry now.
"I'm sorry," he repeated helplessly, and then he rose and drew his sword.
The knight walked slowly away from the cairn in the center of the valley. He had built it next to the little stream that flowed there. He didn't know if she liked streams, but it was the prettiest spot he'd been able to find. She had been pretty, beneath what the dragon and her own kin had done to her.
He swung up on the back of his horse and turned the big animal's head on a path that would lead south, paralleling the hills for some time before turning to find a different road than the one he'd come by. If he passed again through that little village it would take only a wrong word, only a look even, to ignite a rage in him that burned hotter than dragon's fire. They would not survive it.
But they were the King's citizens, and he the King's knight. So he would go far out of his way to avoid them. He needed to pass to the south anyway. There was rumor of a dragon there. He would gather news of it as he went. And he would hope, and pray to any god that might listen, that if he did find a dragon, that it would be one of the easy ones. One of the ones where a dragon was all he had to kill.