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action on the part of those witnessing, which might prove to have consequences
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he could end up regretting having put in motion.
Accordingly, he joined the others for the evening meal, paid a couple of
visits to Brian before bedtime; and found him asleep both times, but with a
fair amount of the small beer drunk. Finally, Jim rolled himself up in his own
mattress not far from Brian's bed, at a fairly early evening hour, since he
looked forward to rising with or before daylight. He also left enough floor
space for Dafydd, who was considerately yielding all the bed to Brian at the
moment.
It was, indeed, before daylight when he woke. He had become enough of a
fourteenth-century person to wake most of the time when he needed to. In this
case, what he needed was to rise enough before sunrise to dress, eat and drink
something, pack some more food and drink to take with him, and ride out from
the castle.
He would have preferred to have left the castle on foot; but that would have
attracted all kinds of attention. Knights did not go anywhere out of doors on
foot when they could travel on horseback, any more than the cowboys of the
western plains those same who had trained their horses to stand
"ground-hitched" if the reins were dropped to the ground had walked when they
could ride.
About half a mile from the castle, he got off and tethered his horse on a
fairly long tether to a face of rock. It was only about twenty feet high, but
vertical; and held a little niche into which the horse could back to face any
predator that came at it. It was the most he could do for it; and it was for
that reason that, with a somewhat guilty feeling, he had borrowed one of the
de Mer horses from the stable; rather than riding out on his own war horse,
who was too valuable to risk by leaving staked out all day like this.
He patted the horse on the neck by way of apology for leaving it alone like
this and took the food and flask of drink he had packed. He carried these off
until he was out of sight of the horse among the trees. Experience had taught
him that horses did not take kindly to his turning into a dragon before their
eyes.
A horse, quite clearly, did not bother to ask itself how a human could become
a dragon. It concentrated merely on the most important fact which was that
there was suddenly now a dragon, complete with very large jaws and claws, in
its immediate vicinity; and usually went wild with panic.
Once safely out of sight, he laid down his food and flask, then disrobed
completely and rolled his clothing up, including his boots. After a moment's
thought he added his sword, in its scabbard.
He tied clothes and food and weapons to his belt, looped the belt around his
neck with the weight of the sword and scabbard behind, across his shoulders;
fastening the belt, finally, with the tang of its buckle in the last hole.
Then he wrote on the blackboard on the inside of his forehead:
ME?DRAGON
He felt, as usual, no perceptible sense of change, except that the package of
weapons, food and drink seemed to move upward on his back as his neck became
very much thicker.
Looking down at his former arms and legs, however, he saw that they had
become the forelegs and the very strong hind legs of a dragon. And he could
feel the weight of the wings on his shoulders, together with the tremendous
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muscles there that he needed for flying purposes. The bundle he had made up
now seemed to be holding firmly between acouple of the row of triangular bones
that ran along the outside of his spine.
He had slipped a note under the door of Liseth's room before leaving the
castle, with clearly printed letters and simple words, telling her to give
Greywings orders to show him the way to Snorrl; and explaining that he would
be in the air in the form of a dragon.
He stretched his wings, feeling an actual pleasure in the latent power of
those mighty wing muscles; and, with a leap, sprang into the air and began
swiftly climbing upward.
It was dragon practice, even dragon instinct, he had discovered long since,
to climb to at least a thousand or so feet, before starting to search for a
thermal in other words, an updraft of air from the surface below.
On such an updraft he could glide, making a circle with rigid out-swept
wings, and without the effort of personally powering his heavy body through
the air. Even with his great wings and massive wing muscles, straight flying
was a tremendous task. He reached his height and searched the sky for
Greywings. But there was no sight or sign of the falcon anywhere under that
gradually brightening dome of pink whiteness that was the early day seen from
this altitude.
It was difficult craning his neck to turn his head enough to see behind him,
so he gave it up. The castle was dwindling in the distance back there. He had
not found a thermal, and had instinctively gone into a glide which at a
shallow angle was taking him back to the earth below. He pumped his wings
again vigorously, climbing another five hundred feet or so, and thought he
caught a glimpse of a speck in the sky that might be Greywings, before he went
back into a glide again back toward the earth, still not having found the
thermal he needed.
He was beginning to wonder a little bit at the difficulty at finding one of
these updrafts. At dawn like this, with the sun hitting the night-cold ground,
thermals should be beginning, at least; although such things as patches of
woods and so forth might not yet have begun to set up a steady upward flow of
warmed air from the reflected sunlight.
He had already lost what altitude he had recently gained and some more
besides. Once more, a little angrily, he pumped his wings and climbed a good
eight hundred feet in addition. Once more, he went into a shallow glide; and
was just beginning to think that he had felt a thermal though a small one, one
too small to be of any use to a flier his size when there was the harsh cry of
a falcon in his ear and something dealt a stunning blow to the back of his
head.
He shook his head, more out of habit than anything else. His dragon skull was
quite thick enough not to be bothered much by a blow that in his human body
possibly could have made him unconscious as, clearly, the clawed knuckles of
the falcon, both feet bunched together, had struck him at the end of a dive
from the peregrine's obviously superior height.
Nor did he have to be Liseth to interpret what that angry shout of a falcon's
had been. Roughly translated, it had meant, plainly enough:
"Stop this damn bobbing around and start flying in sensible fashion!"
It had occurred to him that if the falcon was to keep diving on him like
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that, however, he might have to do something about it. Possibly he might roll
over on his back in mid-air, so as to catch the bird in his foreclaws, if
not lightly in his jaws; to teach her that, she would just have to put up with
the fact that dragons had different problems from falcons in moving through
the air. But at that moment he finally found his thermal; and with relief went
into a soaring circle, spiraling up a strong updraft away from the earth
below.
He looked around for Greywings, half expecting another blow on the back of
the head, and was abruptly relieved to see that the falcon was now circling on
the same thermal at a hundred feet above him. Soaring was one thing they had
in common. Even the peregrine could not fly steadily all the time, in spite of
the fact of being able to dive on a prey at close to two hundred miles an
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