'I haven't seen him. Yes, I was close. I was the one who held the sword. This sword. But this isn't mine. Where's mine?' As he spoke, Mark rose slowly to his feet. His voice that had been calm was on the verge of breaking.
Ben stared at him. There was a sound nearby, and they both turned quickly to see Barbara. She was as muddy and bedraggled as they were, carrying her hatchet in one hand, sling in the other.
'Where's Nestor?' she asked, predictably.
Haltingly, his mind still numbed by the fact that his sword was gone, Mark recounted his version of events since the wagon had tipped over. They looked at him, and at the sword; then Barbara took the weapon from his hands, and pressed gently with the point right on the middle of one of the dragon's thickest scales. There was a spark from the steel. With a faint, shrill sound, the blade sank in as into butter.
Mark said: 'That looks almost exactly like my sword, but it must be Nestor's. Where's mine?' The feeling of shock that had paralyzed him was suddenly gone, and he ran to search amid the jumbled contents of the wagon. He couldn't find the sword there, or anywhere nearby. The others followed him, looking for Nestor, but he was not to be found either, alive or dead. They called his name, at first softly, then with increasing boldness. The only bodies to be found were those of soldiers, mangled by the landwalker before it had been killed.
'If he's gone,' said Mark, 'I wonder if he took my sword?'
He might have, by mistake, they decided — no one thought it would make sense for Nestor to take Mark's weapon and deliberately leave his own behind.
'But where'd he go?'
'Maybe the soldiers got him. And the other sword.'
'They were in a blind panic, just getting out of here. The ones who're still alive are running yet.'
Dead riding-beasts were lying about too, and some severely injured. Ben dispatched these with his club. The team of loadbeasts was still attached to the spilled wagon, and fortunately did not appear to be seriously hurt. The human survivors, pushing together, tipped the wagon back on its wheels again, and saw that all four wheels still would roll.
While Mark continued a fruitless search for his sword, the others reloaded cargo, throwing essentials, valuables, and junk all back into the wagon. They reloaded the now empty frogcrock, and at last the tumbled dragon-cage.
Barbara paused with her hand on the cage, whose forlorn occupant still keened. 'Do you suppose the big ones came after this? They must have heard it yelping.'
Ben shook his head decisively. 'Never knew dragons to act that way. Big ones don't care about a small one, except maybe to eat it if they're hungry, which they usually are.' Ben was worried, but not about dragons. 'If Nestor's gone, what're we going to do?'
Barbara said: 'We've looked everywhere around here. Either he's still running, or else he got hurt or killed and washed down the river. I can't think of anything else.'
'Or,' said Mark, coming back toward the others in his vain seeking, 'the soldiers got him after all. And my sword with him.'
They all looked once more for Nestor and the sword. They even followed the river downstream for a little distance. It seemed plain that a body drifting in this stream would catch in shallows or on a rock before it had gone very far. Still there was no sign of man or weapon.
At last Barbara was the decisive one. 'If the soldiers did get him, he's gone, and if he's dead he's dead. If he's still running, well, we can't catch him when we've got no idea which way he went. We'd better get ourselves out of here. More soldiers could come back. Einar, your sword's just not here either. If Nestor's got it, and he catches up with us, you'll get it back.'
'Where'll we go?' Ben sounded almost like a child.
She answered firmly: 'On to Sir Andrew's. If Nestor is going to come looking for us anywhere, it'll be there.'
'But what'll we say when we get there? What'll we do? Sir Andrew's expecting Nestor.'
'We'll say he's delayed.' Barbara patted Ben's arm hard, encouragingly. 'Anyway, we've still got Nestor's sword. You can kill dragons with it if you have to, can't you? If little Einar here can do it.'
Ben looked, if not frightened, at least doubtful. 'I guess we can talk about that on the way.'
Chapter 8
Two men were sitting in Kind Sir Andrew's dungeon. One, who was young, perched on a painted stool just inside the bars of a commodious whitewashed cell. The other man was older, better dressed, and occupied a similar seat not very far outside the bars. He was reading aloud to the prisoner out of an ancient book. To right and left were half a dozen other cells, all apparently unoccupied, all clean and whitewashed, all surprisingly light and airy for apartments in a dungeon. Though this level of the castle was half underground, there were windows set high in the end wall of the large untenanted cell at the far end of the row.
At a somewhat greater distance, down a branching, stonevaulted, cross corridor, were other cells that gave evidence of habitation, though not by human beings. Sir Andrew had caused that more remote portion of his dungeon to be converted into a kind of bestiary, now housing birds and beasts of varied types, whose confinement had required the weaving of cord nets across the original heavy gratings of the cell doors and windows.
Yes, there were more windows in that wing. You could tell by the amount of light along the corridor that way. The young man on the stool inside the cell, who was currently the only human inmate in the whole dungeon, and who was supposed to be listening to the reading, kept looking about him with a kind of chronic wonder, at windows and certain other surprises. The young man's name was at least that was the only name he could remember for himself. He was thin-faced and thin-boned, and had lank, dark, thinning hair. His clothes were ragged, and his weathered complexion showed that he had not been an indoor prisoner for any length of recent time. He had quick eyes — quick nervous hands as well, hands that now and then rubbed at his wrists as if he were still in need of reassurance that they were not bound. Every now and then he would raise his head and turn it, distracted by the small cheerful cries that came from his fellow prisoners down the corridor.
Kaparu was no stranger to the inside of jails and dungeons, but never in all his wanderings had he previously encountered or even imagined a jail like this. To begin with, light and air were present in quite astonishing quantities. Yes, the large cell at the end of the row had real windows, man-sized slits extending through the whole thickness of the lower castle wall, like tunnels open to the bright late summer afternoon. The way it looked, the last prisoner put in there might just have walked out through the window. In through those embrasures came not only air and light, but additional cheerful sounds. Outside on Sir Andrew's green the fair was getting under way.
There was also a sound, coming from somewhere else in the dungeon, of water dripping. But somehow, in this clean, white interior, the sound suggested not dankness and slow time, but rather the outdoor gurgle of a brook. Or, more aptly, the lapping of a lake. The castle stood on a modest rise of ground, the highest in the immediate neighborhood, but its back was to a sizable lake, whose surface level was only a little lower than this dungeon floor.
Resting on the floor of the prisoner's cell, not far from the feet of his stool, was a metal dish that held a sizable fragment of bread, bread fresh from the oven today and without insects. Beside the plate, a small pottery jug held clean drinking water. At intervals the prisoner involuntarily darted a glance toward the bread, and each time he did so his left foot as if in reflex lifted a trifle from the stool — rung it was on — but in this peculiar dungeon there were evidently no rats to be continually kicked and shooed away.
And each time the prisoner turned his head to look at the plate, his gaze was likely to linger, in sheer disbelief, upon the small vase filled with fresh cut flowers, that stood beside his water jug.
The man who sat outside the cell, so patiently reading aloud from the old book, had not been young for some indeterminate time. He was broadly built, and quite firmly and positively established in middle age, as if he had no intention at all of ever growing really old. His clothing was rich in fabric and in workmanship, but simple in cut, and more than ordinarily untidy. Like his garments, his beard and mustache of sandy gray were marked with traces of his recently concluded lunch, which had obviously comprised some richer stuff than bread and water.
At more or less regular intervals, he turned the pages of the old book with powerful though ungraceful
