Rogue Dragon by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

to go out after him with beaters and musics and bannermen and archers and guns. Yes. And to make damned sure that you kills him, you takes him when he’s a chick and marks him with acid—feels carefully for that certain spot and paints the X so the crux is right over it. Correct?”
    Jon-Joras nodded.
    “All right,” said Hue. “Now. If the Gentlemen really had any interest in putting down dragons, they’d have the chick-boys kill ’em… and not mark ’em. Right?”
    “Yes, of course—but you’re making a point that no one needs to have made. Of course they preserve dragons, the whole place is nothing but one big game preserve.”
    Hue said, “Right. And they’s the game wardens. And what’re we? Poachers? We lives here, too. Haven’t we got no rights? No. None. Once in ten years, maybe, one of us is lucky enough to get took on as a servant to a Gentleman. And once in, maybe a hundred years, some servant is lucky enough to get made a Gentleman—”
    “Roedeskant!”
    “Yes… Roedeskant… Does he remember what his grandser was? His stick is heavier against us than anyone’s. Or was. Don’t know, yet, if he got away alive. But, to go back. The drags, now—”
    His flat voice droned on. But Jon-Joras was far from being bored at what Hue had to tell him, told him with the endless attention to and reiteration of detail which only the monomaniac is capable of. Distilled, it amounted to a realization that the dragon, if left alone, was harmless: a sort of gigantic chicken, with no brain to speak of.
    No one needed beaters to go round up sundi so that they would come and be hunted; it was not necessary to tease and to confuse dire-falcon with banners and musics and archers.
    The entire principle of the ritual murder which constituted a dragon hunt was misdirection. Anyone in good health and who could keep his head, could manage to stay out of a dragon’s way—if the dragon was not goaded into frenzy. Such skill as there was in a hunt was mostly on the part of the bannermen. The function of the archers was only to goad the beast—and create a picturesque pattern of arrows on his hide—and make him rear upright, so that his X-mark was exposed. Anyone who could hit a moving target could kill a dragon.
    And the dragon was thus always killed.
    Wasn’t it?
    Pea-brained as the species was, the individual members were still, like any creature, capable of learning something from experience. But no dragon was allowed to do so, under the Hunt system. All talk of small, feeble Man the Hunter pitting himself against the skill and cunning of the great dragon was cant and hypocrisy. The novice dragon had neither skill nor cunning, just his teeth, his talons, and his weight. Now and then it had happened, over the years, that some trembling finger on the trigger did manage to miss. If the dragon then turned and ran from the guns, his one vulnerable spot no longer visible—if the same dragon, escaped, was unlucky enough to come across another hunt—and again escape—
    “Why, then, boy, you got the one thing that every Gentleman fears more than anything in the world. You got a dragon that knows better. You got a rogue dragon!”
    Light blazed in Jon-Joras’s mind. His body, which had been drooping with stiffness and with pain, jerked straight upright. “And that’s what you’re doing here!” He cried. “In the dragon pit—you’re training rogues!”
    Hue’s scarred head nodded, nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the dragon pits. We’re training rogues. We’re training the drags so that they’ll know better than to be distracted by banner-wefts and music. We’re training them so that they won’t waste time plucking at arrows. By the time we’re done and he’s ready to be released, you’ve got a dragon that’s what the Master Huntsmen claim every drag really is.” His voice sank and his thin, lipless mouth opened wide.
    “And aren’t they surprised…” he whispered.
    Memories of