So, I had a dragon, and a trap. That just left bait.
When I came home from Outremer, carrying everything I owned in a hemp sack slung over my shoulder, I hardly knew the place. I looked down from the top of the ridge expecting to see cornfields, neatly laid hedges, a properly made-up road leading through coppiced spinneys to our house. Instead, I saw a wilderness of gorse, briars and nettles. The fields and the hedges and the stumps of the felled trees had vanished, buried like the stones of the ancient cities of Outremer. There was no road, and no house.
Three years after I went away, apparently, there was a fire. The house burned down; it spread to the spinney, and from there to the fields. My father got out in time, but he was never the same afterward. He moved to a cottage for a few months but proved entirely incapable of looking after himself, so the monks took him in and gave him a cell, board, and lodging in return for a second mortgage on the estate. He died six months later, and they buried him in their own graveyard; something of an honor, apparently, for a layman.
It didn’t take long for the tenants to find out that I was home. They sent a deputation to the inn to welcome me, and I had to tell them that not everybody comes home from Outremer leading a string of ponies loaded down with plundered gold. They took it reasonably well. Oh, well, they said, and off they went. Later, I went to see them each in turn, with some vague idea in my mind of discussing arrears of rent. But it had been hard times all around, they told me, since the old master died, and what I’d seen inclined me to believe them. Three failed harvests in succession, and the grass so bad, they kept the stock alive by cutting hazel branches from the hedges. That’s bad, I told them, thinking of the villages in Outremer we’d been sworn to protect (and where one day the corn will grow so high, because of all that ash), and they weren’t to worry about rent until they were back on their feet again.
I was still wearing the shoes I’d walked two hundred miles in, from the coast all the way up the military road to Loucy. They were good shoes. I took them off a dead heathen in a canyon somewhere, and he’d got them from one of our lot, a rich man’s son to judge by shape of the last and the quality of the stitching. They still had a good few miles left in them. A man wearing shoes like that wasn’t going to worry too much about sleeping in a barn, or living off unfortunate creatures caught in snares, while he sets about clearing fifty acres of tangled briars with an old hook he found in a fallen-down toolshed.
I was good with cutting tools in Outremer. I could slice a man’s arm off with a backhand cut. And the worst a bramble can do is scratch you up a bit. I had energy and motivation; best of all, I was angry (and the greatest of these is anger). But I’d been in the sun too long. I got soaked to the skin by a heavy shower, and next thing I knew I had fever. My friend the lion-catcher had taught me how to cure it, but those herbs don’t grow here. I was sick as a dog for a week, and when I snapped out of it, I had no strength left. I limped over to the abbey, where they took me in and gave me bowl after bowl of barley broth with dumplings, and showed me the mortgage deed my father had signed. And that was the end of my crusade to take back my inheritance.
I was twenty-eight years old, and I could see no point in anything. But I was still that crazy kid who’d killed a dragon with his bare hands; so I went south and signed on with one of the free companies as a mercenary. I found I fit in well there. I was famous. They called me ormsbana and wurmtoter, and had a special banner made with a dragon on it, and the enemy ran away as soon as they heard we were coming. We trashed a lot of cottages and burned a lot of corn, and three years later I’d saved up a hundred angels, which is a lot of money, and I bought a farm, down on the coast, a mile or so from the Straits. From my window, I could see the ships setting sail for Outremer, and very occasionally at night I could see the beacons on the other side, lit to show them the way into the harbor.
I had a shrewd idea where would be a good place for my trap, if only I could find it again. I was afraid it would all look different, so much else having changed, but when we got there it was exactly as I remembered it. There was a certain tree, under which I’d sat one day after I’d been looking for my brother. It was taller and thicker, but not by very much.
You can’t really hide a machine made of iron girders weighing well over a ton, so I told them to put it down anywhere, gave them their money, and watched them trundle away. Then I walked around it a few times. A trap is a trap. I could tell what it was and how it was supposed to work just by glancing at it. But Garcio the smith hadn’t known until I told him, and a dragon is just a dumb brute.
I wound up the shutters using the winch provided, engaged the sear in the notch, disengaged the hook and chain, and hung them back out of the way. There was a pressure plate on the floor. When the dragon stood on it, it would pivot and pull on a cable, which would lift the sear out of battery, and the front and rear shutters would fall simultaneously. There was also a little wicket gate at the back, between the back shutter and the end of the frame. I made sure it opened and shut easily.
The space between the shutter and the wicket was where the bait had to go. I’d thought to bring a little three-legged milking stool. I ducked under the bottom edge of the shutter and sat down on the stool. Might as well be comfortable while I was waiting.
Not for very long. Dragons have poor eyesight but a marvelous sense of smell. It came, just as I’d anticipated, out of the canopy of that damned tree, unwinding itself like a coil of living rope. Last time I’d been preoccupied; this time I made a point of looking, because a dragon isn’t something you see every day. Neck as thick as your waist, head like a pig, tiny black eyes, crest like sword blades, scales like the armor they wear in Outremer, teeth like handspikes. And a voice in my head saying, Run.
Nice of it to care. But there comes a point in a man’s life when he has nowhere left to run to, and a thousand angels is a very great deal of money. I looked into the dragon’s eyes and saw what I’d expected to see.
“Hello, Juifrez,” I said.
It lunged at me. I scampered back, fumbling for the wicket catch. As I’d anticipated, it couldn’t reach me without sliding into the cage. It arched its spine and slithered forward, and I heard the pressure plate creak. Its head shot forward, just as I threw myself out of the wicket, hit the ground, and rolled. I heard the thud as the shutters fell.
The trap was designed to catch lions. It was far too short for twenty feet of dragon. But the shutters were sheet iron, three inches thick, and one had slammed down on its neck, pinning it to the floor, and the other had trapped its tail. It wasn’t too happy about that. It shook and wriggled, trying to jackknife, so hard it lifted the whole contraption a handspan off the ground, but it couldn’t get free. The shutters were too heavy.
I heard a voice in my head: Let me go. Please. But even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t. I’d have had to get the hook under the shutters and winch them up, and the winch was buried under the dragon’s body. And I knew if I tried to get to it, the dragon would kill me. And what had my lord the duke had to say on the subject, or something quite similar? Once captured, he was an asset of the enemy and needed to be dealt with. And a thousand angels is a lot of money.
I looked down at my leg and saw a tear in the cloth, tinged with blood. Maybe I’d scratched myself on a sharp edge of the frame, or a thorn, or maybe the dragon’s teeth had just nicked me before I got out of its way. Damn, I thought.