He gave me a hurt look, as though I’d just refused to marry him. “You’re too scared,” he said.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Yesterday I bought up all the mortgages on your land,” he said. “If I foreclose, can you find two thousand angels within fourteen days?”
“No,” I said.
“Will you do this perfectly straightforward little job for me?”
“Yes,” I said.
Two thousand angels is a lot of money. It’s about half what our estate is worth: two angels an acre. It’s roughly what it costs to fit out two knights and send them to fight in Outremer.
When my brother Raimbaut was twenty-four, my lord the duke decided to follow the call of his conscience and his heart and join the soldiers of God fighting the heathens in Outremer. It was a noble, beautiful thing to do, or so people said. And of course he called up his tenants and his subinfeudees to go with him, since one man on his own can’t achieve very much in a war, even if he’s a peer of the realm whose ancestors were dukes in the Cascenais when the king’s ancestors were still chasing goats up mountains. My father was too old to go, so Raimbaut went instead.
Have you ever stopped to think how much all that stuff costs? Item, one mail shirt. Item, one pair of ankle-length mail chausses. Item, one coat of plates. Item, one helmet, with nasal. Items, one gambeson, one aketon, two gauntlets; one warhorse, one palfrey, two packhorses, three amblers for his squire and his two men at arms. One sword, two lances, one shield, and so on, and so on. Total, eight hundred and thirty-six angels. Add to that traveling expenses and living expenses—
Only he didn’t. He died of dysentery three weeks after he got there. The army was in full retreat at the time, so they had to dump his body, and all his expensive kit; presumably the enemy got the kit and sold it to the Tedesci brothers, who buy all their plunder and sell it back to the Defenders of the Faith at the Foregate fair at Aescra. But not to worry, the duke’s marshals told him, plenty more where he came from. The obligation was still due, and my father still had a son. So that was all right.
Two thousand angels, which my father raised by pledging his land to the Aechmalota twins, at 3 percent interest, to send Raimbaut and then me to Outremer. You know what they say about a fool and his money.
But if I succeeded, on the other hand, his majesty would give me the mortgage deeds, and a thousand angels cash. A thousand angels is a lot of money.
First, find a dragon. Not as easy as it sounds. The species isn’t native to our part of the world; it’s too cold, and a good crisp winter will achieve more in the way of pest control than a hundred knights, with or without enchanted swords. The only specimens to be encountered north of the Middle Sea are the handful brought back by noble lords returning from Outremer as souvenirs or gifts for the man who has everything.
It is more blessed, Scripture tells us, to give than to receive; and although I have my doubts about that as a general rule, it surely applies when the gift is a dragon. For a start, you’ve got to build a special house for it to live in, with very thick stone walls and underfloor heating, and you’ve got to feed it a ruinous amount of fresh meat every day; and if, God forbid, the wretched thing ever gives you the slip and gets loose on your neighbors’ land, you’ve got to go deal with it, or find some poor fool who’ll deal with it for you. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to live next door but three to a young idiot who’ll rip its tongue out and smash its head in free of charge, just to settle a score, but that almost never happens. Who’d be stupid enough to do it?
I said just now that dragons can’t survive the northern winter, and that’s almost true. Out of the few that escape, a very few of them can. Usually they find a deep cave to insulate themselves against the frost and the bitter wind, and hibernate until spring. Caves that deep are few and far between, and in those places where there are such caves, generally speaking, there aren’t enough sheep and cattle for the dragon to feed up on, to build its fat reserves to see it through until spring comes along.
In fact, the only place north of the Saëve where you might reasonably expect to find one is where the moors meet the mountain foothills, near the small market town of Loucy. It’s a godforsaken place. The Blood River—so called because it runs red with rust from the iron ore deposits at Weal Jehan; the water’s poisonous down as far as Boc Loucy, and nothing grows on its banks for a hundred yards on either side—bisects a deep, windswept valley, half of which (roughly two thousand acres) just about grows oats and barley, while the other half is forested with small, twisted holm oaks, no use for anything except firewood. There are four tiny villages north of the town, surrounding the small, dilapidated manor house where the de Loucys have lived for about three hundred years, and where I grew up.
We reckoned the dragons escaped from the grange at Emm, the furthest outpost of my lord the duke’s estate at Chastelbest, though of course we couldn’t prove it. Shortly after my lord’s father came back from Outremer, they built an enormous barn in a deep combe between the ridge on which the house stands and the forest (which extends over the Hog’s Back and joins up with the Loucy woods at Moyenchamber). They were three years building it, and they had masons and tradesmen in from the city, sixty miles away—odd, don’t you think, just to build an ordinary barn? But nobody ever heard of straw or pease or hay being carted there. But flocks of sheep were driven down from the top pastures, and herds of pigs came up from the home cottages; and nobody ever saw them come out again. Proving nothing, of course. But the first dragon showed up in Loucy woods about five years after the barn was built. I was nineteen at the time.
Not so very long after that, the barn burned to the ground in a great fire, which spread to Hog’s Back Wood, over the top and down into our woods, though no great harm done, since they’re all useless, as I told you; about nine hundred acres lost on our side, which is all tangled briars and withies now. The grange people never rebuilt the barn, and over the years the tenants have helped themselves to the stones for making and mending walls, so there’s nothing to see there these days except a long rectangle of foxgloves and gorse.
Anyway, if I wanted to find a dragon, that’s where I’d look; just as, if I wanted to look for death, I’d throw a rope over a tree or eat yellow-cap mushrooms.
I was in Outremer for five years.
Doesn’t sound all that long. My lord the duke’s eldest son has just got back from seven years at the university, where I gather he distinguished himself by reading several books and being seen at a number of lectures, modestly attired in a black silk scholar’s gown trimmed with sable. That’s two years away from home longer than me, and more or less the same distance, and yet you’d hardly know to look at him that he’s been away at all.
Five years in Outremer, however, is a very long time. Half of the new arrivals—my brother Raimbaut, for instance—die within the first three months. Those who don’t tend to last anything between six and eighteen months; two years makes you a veteran, someone to be pointed out and stared at. After three years, they send you home.
I was there for five years, and while I was there I met an interesting man. He wasn’t one of us. He served the emperor, on whose behalf we were supposed to be fighting, though it was no secret that the emperor reckoned we were worse than the heathens and did ten times as much damage to his long-suffering people. This man told me that before he was conscripted, he’d worked for a master who caught wild animals for the Hippodrome games in the Golden City—lions, bears, elephants, that sort of thing.