Dragon's Trail

I: OVERTURE-1

I

OVERTURE

“Fighting was fun; this was the thing. Fighting was tremendous fun.”

— Ewart Oakeshott

The Middle Ages had come to Camille Bay.

It was a rainy Memorial Day weekend. Spring seemed to have been and gone without a single hour of sunshine, and the coming summer held no promises.

Camille Bay, Maine, is a tiny Birkenstock town known for its artistic population and a never-ending slew of obscure exhibitions. Camille Bay is host to fantasy conventions, an occasional movie set, and the region’s most prestigious glass-blowing school. She boasts several successful authors among her quiet inhabitants.

The particular way Camille Bay had chosen to draw the immediate world’s attention today entailed a re-creation of a medieval fair in the market square, courtesy of several large Renaissance troupes.

Everyone in the town participated; participation is the town creed. The costumes ranged from casual passers-by in Robin Hood hats, to axe-bearing Norsemen and lace-ruffled Elizabethans. Woe, indeed, to the unwitting tourist, reluctantly handing over his Mobil card to a bearded Norseman in a bearskin cape and a leather jockstrap.

Crius’s vision unclouded in an alley of Camille Bay.

With a fleeting sweat of terror he realized that this was not a world he’d expected and certainly not the world he’d visualized moments ago, standing an ocean of space distant in his chambers at Horlech with the Tower Day celebrations rampaging in the distance.

A granite sky spat mist over a fitful, intense gridwork, a hornets’ nest as garish and searing as the sun even in the intense cold of the day. Everywhere he looked, the world seemed to explode with its own sprinting pulse; every color and edge exquisite in its squarishness and order. He smelled fish and seawater. An unsourced thrum slashed at him from nowhere.

He climbed to his feet on a hard black road. A fine road.

Roads were roads.

Roads hadn’t changed.

There he stood on the road, crumpled, hands on his knees, awestruck at a piece of trash more bright and polished than anything he’d ever seen, a massive facet of a jewel blowing along the slate of the yard fences and the blacktop of the alley.

He watched it go, and the world tunneled into place in its wake.

Square homes built shoulder to shoulder sprawled up the hills away from the sea. At the end of the alley the road led up the hill, and also down to a calm harbor brimming with boats.

Away from the water, the town was bursting. He knew a festival when he saw one.

Festivals hadn’t changed.

He pulled his hood up and struck out uphill, thrilled with the quality of the road beneath his boots. The noise grew and his pulse quickened.

What a world! What an intense, bright, loud, fast world!

He stopped at a police barrier and reached to warm his hand by its flashing lamp; he found light, but no heat. He touched it. He rested his hand on it. He giggled.

He took a slow look across the multitudes. Warriors in piecemeal armor, commoners in simple dress, well-outfitted courtiers.

Many things, it seemed, had not changed. More than he’d expected.

A mechanical animal, albeit an unkempt and mangy one, butted its way through the street, forcing noblewoman and barbarian alike to leap aside.

He found a space beneath an awning and watched the people pass. An occasional townsperson tipped his hat, someone clapped him on the back, and once a man dressed like a northern tribesman, ridiculously muscled, bumped into him, muttering in a language that was guttural, ancient, and simple.

Across the road, under the eaves, berserker donned hunting hat and woodsman donned horned helmet, and the two laughed at each other.

Two women in court dress emerged from a shop behind him, then threw bright rain jackets over their dresses.

Costumes. Nostalgia. Idealism.

He headed for the center of town, which bustled with demons with swords.

In the late afternoon, away from the noise and the rabble, Crius topped a range of sand and gravel mounds near the sea. He tripped, slid, and came to a rest at the feet of eight men and one woman, all clad in the local garb, not costumes.

Three men pulled the sorcerer to his feet.

“Let him go,” snarled another voice, rife with the crack of authority.

Crius shook his clothes straight and took a look across the nine faces—or eleven, now, he saw—for there were two more men about to duel beyond the line of onlookers.

The woman, though, was the first to hold his attention. She was striking, petite but strong with black hair and eyes and olive-skinned. He laughed inwardly. She looked northern Gavrian. She was not one to bring before the Gateskeep High Council.

Beyond her, the young man with the sharp voice was bare-chested to the sting of the sea air.

With a ponytail and goatee the color of the wet sand behind him, he was on the small side of medium-sized, but his proportions were exaggerated with slabs of long muscle, cat-like. The most wondrous wicked scar, a mark of great pain and courage, graced the knotted muscles of his stomach. He stabbed his rapier into the sand, dropped into a full split, and leaped up again.

Crius knew the type.

He liked this type.

The other man was much larger, much stronger, red-cheeked and thick-bearded in a ruddy shirt and a black jacket. He whipped the jacket off and tossed it to one of his cronies.

Remorseless jaw. Fierce eyes. A warrior to be reckoned with.

But it was the young swordsman whose grin, brilliant as the moon, had snared Crius’s eye.

Here, Crius thought, was a hero: this young rake flipping his rapier from one hand to the other, tossing it behind his back and over his head with a juggler’s ease, all the while bowing smugly.

The grin faded, however, as his opponent was handed a much heavier sword than his own and began limbering up.

Within a moment, both struck an en garde, and so began the challenges.

This was a grudge match. Unofficial, unsponsored, prohibited by a myriad of local statutes, and held well away from the main bustle.

The younger man spoke first. “I, Jarrod Torrealday of Knightsbridge, do accuse you, Harold Reynolds of Torrington, of the crime of r**e. The victim, Lady Siriana, is present to substantiate the charges.” With his weapon he offered her a salute that snapped through the air, and returned his attention to his opponent. Jarrod’s voice became rocky and dropped an octave, and his happy-go-lucky countenance melted into an unforgiving glare. “How will you plead?”

The tip of his rapier was as steady as a star.

Crius was impressed by his professionalism. This was a champion’s champion. This was the man he wanted. And left-handed, he noted. Rare, indeed.

“I protest my innocence,” Harold replied tiredly, and spat on the ground toward Jarrod in punctuation. “And that, on you. I’ll leave you with a story to tell.”

“Well, then,” Jarrod answered, “May God guide the true blade, sir. To the first blood?” Out went the right hand for balance, the right leg a bit behind, weight shifting to and fro.

Harold nodded, his mouth a tight line behind the beard. “So be it. First blood.”

“Get him, Jarrod!” yelled one man from the sidelines.

“Kick his ass, Jarrod!” added another.

They crossed blades. Neither moved for the longest moment.

Harold lunged.

Jarrod exploded forward in a whirl of flashing steel, and Harold crumpled and spilled into a knee-deep puddle, pleading his surrender as Jarrod stomped and beat him.

The blood-thirstier onlookers were disappointed. Though Harold’s nose was smashed, his eye swollen and his beard dripping blood, the duel had lasted only seconds.

Jarrod disarmed him with a kick, his face quivering in fury.

Harold sloshed to his knees to find Jarrod’s rapier pricking him not-so-lightly in the eyebrow.

“Give me your hand,” said Jarrod.

“My h—”

“Your hand!” he screamed, his face reddening.

“Careful, Jarrod!” someone shouted.

Jarrod tossed his rapier well aside, took Harold’s hand in both his, and twisted it. He pried Harold’s ring finger back until it nearly disjointed.

“Tell me to stop,” Jarrod growled. He bent it back further, and Harold yelped again. “Tell me to stop!”

“Ah, st—! Hey!”

“What?”

“Stop!”

Jarrod’s lip curled over his teeth. “Beg me to stop.”

Harold was breathing in panicked gasps, “Stop!”

He snapped the finger back. Harold shrieked. Stomachs wrenched. The Lady Siriana, whom Jarrod had been championing, covered her ears and spun away.

“Now, the next time someone tells you to stop,” Jarrod snarled, “you just remember how that felt, you bastard. And you,” he panted, “Will. Stop!” and he broke another one.

He shoved Harold back into the water with a foot on his chest and waded ashore.

He toe-flipped his rapier up into his hand, snatched his shirt from an onlooker, and left at a trot that in five steps turned into a sprint.

Siriana attempted to run after him, but one of Jarrod’s supporters took her arm and held her back.

“Don’t,” was all he said.

“No, I gotta—” she attempted to push past him, but to no avail. “Lemme go!”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “Please, don’t,” he emphasized. “He doesn’t want to see anybody right now.”

Late into the night, Jarrod Torrealday lay awake in bed, unjumbling his thoughts.

Cars slashed by, the headlights making nightmares of the room’s shadows. He turned on his side and listened to his pulse like so many marching feet.

His rapier hung from the doorknob. Headlights roamed over it again and again.

He wished he smoked.

The lights brought flashes: Harold’s acceptance of the duel, Siri begging Jarrod not to hurt him, the conflict and the hatred in her face. The absurdity of crossing swords for a woman he’d met exactly once. Watching Harold warming up, the sloppy footwork and heavy lunges, the beer bottle he’d cast aside. The relief and the frustration of knowing deep inside there was no true danger. Sizing Harold up as drunk, and fat, and clumsy.

And being right.

He’d taken Harold apart in five seconds.

Harold and that ridiculous mammoth blade. Way too much sword for you. Compensating for a deficiency in your . . . character?

Touching blades; thoughts of Harold, and others, of Siri drunk and held down on a feasting table like part of the goddamn buffet.

And you still can’t do anything right.

He picked up his phone, but his hand trembled too hard to read it, much less use it.

The morning’s breath in his throat, dry and ugly; a grip in his gut as a solid year of hell—still so fresh he could smell it if he lay still long enough—stampeded across the darkness. A delusional ex-champion with a rapier. Endless months of crying coaches and shouting lawyers. A kaleidoscope of TV cameras and microphones, a magnificent life vanished like sand through his fingers, and a girl, achingly beautiful, who might as well be a ghost now. All of it an utter screw-up.

And now this.

Crawling out, one Harold at a time.

He took a pull from the bottle of Lagavulin beside the clock, acidic and hot.

His own voice startled him. “What were you gonna do?” he asked the shadows. “Kill him, too?”

He flipped through pictures, finding a block-script quote by Rostand in Cyrano de Bergerac: “I feel too strong to war with mere mortals—bring me giants!”

He took another drink, longer.

It was time to move on.

Carter Sorenson traveled Renaissance festivals giving demonstrations on the history and tactics of the greatsword.

Nearly seven feet tall and so immensely muscled as to appear capable of pulling locomotives with his teeth, his head and goatee were shorn equally close and flecked with gray. He had played three years as a defensive end for the Patriots, and later had done quite well on the professional mixed martial arts circuit—facts that were well known throughout the Faire.

He regularly drew quite a crowd.

Carter was looking for Jarrod in the post-fair gala. Sunday mornings provided the last chance for browsing the artisans’ tents. By noon the majority would be packing up in preparation for a return to whatever, in their lives, passed for normalcy.

While he didn’t spy Jarrod, he did see Renaldo Salazar, one of Harold’s cronies. Carter had heard that Jarrod and Harold had had a—what did they call it?—a trial the day before, which had ended with Harold in the hospital.

Renaldo wasn't a serious Renaissance enthusiast, but a fringie who liked to flaunt his physique in fur loincloths and matching boots. He was, however, exceptional with a longsword, and had given Carter a run for his money at several historic European martial arts tournaments.