Killbird

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 had told me. And so it was. Still, breaching that belly took the better part of two days, during which I nearly ruined my hardax, put bruises and cuts on my hands, sweated, cursed, tugged, banged away with large stones. I was attacking a plate on the dragon's skin much like the plate on a turtle's belly, and his bones were hard and tough. When at last I had one edge of the plate lifted slightly, I was able to force a branch into the rift to use as a lever. With all my strength I heaved, and one by one the bones gave and then the plate clanged off to ring against the stones and the hard pathway. Inside were wondrous things. Huge, horned arteries, which I attacked with my poor, mutilated hardax. When I cut through one of them the dragon spat fire at me and the feet stopped grinding away. I cut more arteries and small veins and began to gather them, the small veins, because they were indestructible and invaluable for tying things together, for fishing lines, for decoration, since they came in various colors. Soon I had a pile of treasures and was busily cutting my way deeper and deeper into the dragon's entrails. I cut a different kind of artery, and ichor or something similar jetted out. I got some of it on my hands and expected it to burn, but it was cool and slick. I tried to wipe it away. It was oily, like the extract of fat swimmer meat. I wished for something to catch it in, but I had nothing. It would have been invaluable for oiling skulls, for those who were lucky enough not to be cursed. But the true treasures were still beyond my reach after three days of hard and frustrating labor, and it was not until the fourth day that I found what I sought. I had cut and ripped my way into the entrails of the now thoroughly dead beast, and there were wonders. A store of teeth, long, hard, shiny. I took several, although they were heavy. And then the guts, the gaudy little pretties. They were in several boxlike compartments, all connected in a wondrous way, but the veins connecting them were small and flexible and it was the work of mere hours to collect enough to make a dozen necklaces. They came in various sizes, and different colors, with the little veins sticking out both ends, and I bent the veins together to form a huge multistrand necklace and stood atop the dead dragon, the token of my victory around my neck, sweating, bleeding from accidental contact with sharp points of dragon's skin, and sang my victory song. I had only two more chores before going home in triumph. I searched the dragon for a suitable piece of skin to replace my mutilated hardax. I found a small plate and used up the remaining edge of my old hardax to cut the bones holding it. Honed and ground and shaped, it would make a beautiful hardax. Then I bundled all the treasure I could carry into my sleepskin and rolled rocks to