A Dragon-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic Read online

  The Day of

  the Dragon

  As seen through the eyes of bestselling Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award masters, including:

  “St. Dragon and the George” by Gordon R. Dickson: Trapped in a dragon’s body, a college professor must convince a dragon-slaying knight to help rescue his love from an ogre’s clutches!

  “A Plague of Butterflies” by Orson Scott Card: The hidden city was built not to keep the dragons out—but to keep them in. Now butterflies lead a sacred wanderer to the greatest dragon of all, who schemes to replace the forests destroyed by man…

  “The George Business” by Roger Zelazny: Mutual dreams of wealth and death lead a dragon and a gigolo to reach a strange arrangement…

  “Dragons’ Teeth” by David Drake: Roman soldiers must battle a wizard who can raise monsters from the past…

  “Two Yards of Dragon” by L. Sprague de Camp: These days a dragon slayer needs a strong horse, common sense—and a good lawyer!

  “A Hiss of Dragon” by Gregory Benford and Marc Laidlaw: Biotechs created dragons; now surviving them is a growth industry…

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1994 by Margaret Weis and Martin H. Greenberg

  All rights reserved.

  Introduction—Copyright © 1994 by Margaret Weis. Used by arrangement with the author.

  “Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey—Copyright © 1967 by Anne McCaffrey. First appeared in ANALOG. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Cockfight” by Jane Yolen—Copyright © 1980 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  “The Storm King” by Joan D. Vinge—Copyright © 1980 by Joan D. Vinge. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Fellowship of the Dragon” by Patricia A. McKillip—Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Howard Morhaim.

  “The Champion of Dragons” by Mickey Zucker Reichert—Copyright © 1992 by Mickey Zucker Reichert. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Two Yards of Dragon” by L. Sprague de Camp—Copyright © 1976 by Lin Carter. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Saint Willibald’s Dragon” by Esther Friesner—Copyright © 1990 by Esther M. Friesner. First appeared in AMAZING STORIES. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Drama of Dragons” by Craig Shaw Gardner—Copyright © 1980 by Craig Shaw Gardner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The George Business” by Roger Zelazny—Copyright © 1980 by Roger Zelazny. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Dragonbone Flute” by Lois Tilton—Copyright © 1992 by TSR, Inc. First appeared in DRAGON MAGAZINE. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Ice Dragon” by George R.R. Martin—Copyright © 1980 by George R.R. Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Hidden Dragon” by Barbara Delaplace—Copyright © 1992 by Barbara Delaplace. First appeared in DRAGON FANTASTIC. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Last Dragon” by Steve Rasnic Tern—Copyright © 1987 by Steve Rasnic Tem. First appeared in AMAZING STORIES. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Wizard’s Boy” by Nancy Varian Berberick—Copyright © 1986 by Nancy Varian Berberick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Hiss of Dragon” by Gregory Benford and Marc Laidlaw—Copyright © 1977 by Gregory Benford and Marc Laidlaw. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  “A Plague of Butterflies” by Orson Scott Card—Copyright © 1980 by Orson Scott Card. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Ever-After” by eluki bes shahar—Copyright © 1989 by eluki bes shahar. First appeared in DRAGON MAGAZINE. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dragons’ Teeth” by David Drake—Copyright © 1975 by Karl Edward Wagner. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Trials and Tribulations of Myron Blumberg, Dragon” by Mike Resnick—Copyright © 1992 by Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “St. Dragon and the George” by Gordon R. Dickson—Copyright © 1957 by Fantasy House, Inc.; Copyright © 1985 by Gordon R. Dickson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group,

  237 Park Avenue,

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: December 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55517-3

  Contents

  The Day of the Dragon

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Weyr Search

  Cockfight

  The Storm King

  The Fellowship of the Dragon

  The Champion of Dragons

  Two Yards of Dragon

  Saint Willibald’s Dragon

  A Drama of Dragons

  The George Business

  The Dragonbone Flute

  The Ice Dragon

  The Hidden Dragon

  Last Dragon

  The Wizard’s Boy

  A Hiss of Dragon

  A Plague of Butterflies

  The Ever-After

  Dragons’ Teeth

  The Trials and Tribulations of Myron Blumberg, Dragon

  St. Dragon and the George

  INTRODUCTION

  Margaret Weis

  Of all the beasts in the Bestiary, the dragon is the most fascinating. Perhaps because it is—or has become over time and literature—the most human in its nature and characteristics. Dragons attract us with their beauty and grace, fascinate us with their magic, lure us with promises of fabulous wealth, ill-gotten booty, free for the taking, with nary a guilty thought or qualm of conscience, for, after all, we are ridding the world of evil.

  Sometime around 1983, when I first started working as a book editor for TSR, Inc., producers of the Dungeons & Dragons ® role-playing games, the marketing department conducted a survey. They asked the players what the company could do to make the game modules better.

  The answer: The dungeons are fine. We want more dragons.

  One would think battling dragons every Saturday would lose its thrill, but, being a “gamer” myself, I can assure you that nothing causes the heart of a player to quicken, the eye to brighten, than to discover a gigantic clawed footprint in the path or to hear the peasant relate in panicked tones how, “Yon great winged beast done lifted me daughter clean in the air and made off wit’ her!”

  We know that at least half the party won’t survive the encounter, but the knowledge of treasure, of battle with a worthy and cunning foe, draws us on.

  Yet, after the hard-fought battle, with a foe worthy of our steel, who among the party doesn’t feel a pang of regret when the glorious creature falls from the air, mortally wounded. And as we sneak off, like thieves with the treasure, we talk in hushed, almost reverent tones, of the monster we slew, and we feel—deep inside—ashamed, unworthy.

  We know we have felled something greater, more wondrous than ourselves.

  In this volume I have collected some of my very favorite dragon stories, by some of the best-known authors in the science fiction and fantasy fields. Some, I’m sure, you will come to as old favorites, as interesting and exciting to read again as they were the first time. In others, you will find new and entertaining adventures.

  Just exactly the sort of book to take along while posting guard on the king’s treasure caravan. You are reading, enthralled, when suddenly from the sky above, you hear the creak and flap of huge leathery wings.…

  WEYR SEARCH

  Anne McCaffrey

  When is a legend legend? Why is a my
th a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category: Fairy tale? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible, while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character?

  Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, plus one stray it had attracted and held in recent millennia. Its third planet was enveloped by air man could breathe, boasted water he could drink, and possessed a gravity which permitted man to walk confidently erect. Men discovered it, and promptly colonized it, as they did every habitable planet they came to and then—whether callously or through collapse of empire, the colonists never discovered, and eventually forgot to ask—left the colonies to fend for themselves.

  When men first settled on Rukbat’s third world, and named it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger-planet, swinging around its primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit. Within a few generations they had forgotten its existence. The desperate path the wanderer pursued brought it close to its stepsister every two hundred [Terran] years at perihelion.

  When the aspects were harmonious and the conjunction with its sister-planet close enough, as it often was, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and hospitable planet.

  It was during the frantic struggle to combat this menace dropping through Pern’s skies like silver threads that Pern’s contact with the mother-planet weakened and broke. Recollections of Earth receded further from Pernese history with each successive generation until memory of their origins degenerated past legend or myth, into oblivion.

  To forestall the incursions of the dreaded Threads, the Pernese, with the ingenuity of their forgotten Yankee forebears and between first onslaught and return, developed a highly specialized variety of a life form indigenous to their adopted planet—the winged, tailed, and fire-breathing dragons, named for the Earth legend they resembled. Such humans as had a high empathy rating and some innate telepathic ability were trained to make use of and preserve this unusual animal whose ability to teleport was of immense value in the fierce struggle to keep Pern bare of Threads.

  The dragons and their dragonmen, a breed apart, and the shortly renewed menace they battled, created a whole new group of legends and myths.

  As the menace was conquered the populace in the Holds of Pern settled into a more comfortable way of life. Most of the dragon Weyrs eventually were abandoned, and the descendants of heroes fell into disfavor, as the legends fell into disrepute.

  This, then, is a tale of legends disbelieved and their restoration. Yet—how goes a legend? When is myth?

  Drummer, beat, and piper, blow,

  Harper, strike, and soldier, go.

  Free the flame and sear the grasses

  Till the dawning Red Star passes.

  Lessa woke, cold. Cold with more than the chill of the everlastingly clammy stone walls. Cold with the prescience of a danger greater than when, ten full Turns ago, she had run, whimpering, to hide in the watch-wher’s odorous lair.

  Rigid with concentration, Lessa lay in the straw of the redolent cheese room, sleeping quarters shared with the other kitchen drudges. There was an urgency in the ominous portent unlike any other forewarning. She touched the awareness of the watch-wher, slithering on its rounds in the courtyard. It circled at the choke-limit of its chain. It was restless, but oblivious to anything unusual in the predawn darkness.

  The danger was definitely not within the walls of Hold Ruath. Nor approaching the paved perimeter without the Hold where relentless grass had forced new growth through the ancient mortar, green witness to the deterioration of the once stone-clean Hold. The danger was not advancing up the now little used causeway from the valley, nor lurking in the craftsmen’s stony holdings at the foot of the Hold’s cliff. It did not scent the wind that blew from Tillek’s cold shores. But still it twanged sharply through her senses, vibrating every nerve in Lessa’s slender frame. Fully roused, she sought to identify it before the prescient mood dissolved. She cast outward, toward the Pass, farther than she had ever pressed. Whatever threatened was not in Ruatha…yet. Nor did it have a familiar flavor. It was not, then, Fax.

  Lessa had been cautiously pleased that Fax had not shown himself at Hold Ruath in three full Turns. The apathy of the craftsmen, the decaying farmholds, even the green-etched stones of the Hold infuriated Fax, self-styled Lord of the High Reaches, to the point where he preferred to forget the reason why he had subjugated the once proud and profitable Hold.

  Lessa picked her way among the sleeping drudges, huddled together for warmth, and glided up the worn steps to the kitchen-proper. She slipped across the cavernous kitchen to the stable-yard door. The cobbles of the yard were icy through the thin soles of her sandals and she shivered as the predawn air penetrated her patched garment.

  The watch-wher slithered across the yard to greet her, pleading, as it always did, for release. Glancing fondly down at the awesome head, she promised it a good rub presently. It crouched, groaning, at the end of its chain as she continued to the grooved steps that led to the rampart over the Hold’s massive gate. Atop the tower, Lessa stared toward the east where the stony breasts of the Pass rose in black relief against the gathering day.

  Indecisively she swung to her left, for the sense of danger issued from that direction as well. She glanced upward, her eyes drawn to the red star which had recently begun to dominate the dawn sky. As she stared, the star radiated a final ruby pulsation before its magnificence was lost in the brightness of Pern’s rising sun.

  For the first time in many Turns, Lessa gave thought to matters beyond Pern, beyond her dedication to vengeance on the murderer Fax for the annihilation of her family. Let him but come within Ruath Hold now and he would never leave.

  But the brilliant ruby sparkle of the Red Star recalled the Disaster Ballads—grim narratives of the heroism of the dragonriders as they braved the dangers of between to breathe fiery death on the silver Threads that dropped through Pern’s skies. Not one Thread must fall to the rich soil, to burrow deep and multiply, leaching the earth of minerals and fertility. Straining her eyes as if vision would bridge the gap between periol and person, she stared intently eastward. The watch-wher’s thin, whistled question reached her just as the prescience waned.

  Dawnlight illumined the tumbled landscape, the unplowed fields in the valley below. Dawnlight fell on twisted orchards, where the sparse herds of milchbeasts hunted stray blades of spring grass. Grass in Ruatha grew where it should not, died where it should flourish. An odd brooding smile curved Lessa’s lips. Fax realized no profit from his conquest of Ruatha … nor would he, while she, Lessa, lived. And he had not the slightest suspicion of the source of this undoing.

  Or had he? Lessa wondered, her mind still reverberating from the savage prescience of danger. East lay Fax’s ancestral and only legitimate Hold. Northeast lay little but bare and stony mountains and Benden, the remaining Weyr, which protected Pern.

  Lessa stretched, arching her back, inhaling the sweet, untainted wind of morning.

  A cock crowed in the stableyard. Lessa whirled, her face alert, eyes darting around the outer Hold lest she be observed in such an uncharacteristic pose. She unbound her hair, letting it fall about her face concealingly. Her body drooped into the sloppy posture she affected. Quickly she thudded down the stairs, crossing to the watch-wher. It lurred piteously, its great eyes blinking against the growing daylight. Oblivious to the stench of its rank breath, she hugged the scaly head to her, scratching its ears and eye ridges. The watch-wher was ecstatic with pleasure, its long body trembling, its clipped wings rustling. It alone knew who she was or cared. And it was the only creature in all Pern she trusted since the day she had blindly sought refuge in its dark stinking lair to escape Fax’s thirsty swords that had drunk so deeply of Ruathan blood.

  Slowly she rose, cautioning it to remember to be as vicious to her as to all should anyone be near. It promised to obey her, swaying back and forth to emphasize its relu
ctance.

  The first rays of the sun glanced over the Hold’s outer wall. Crying out, the watch-wher darted into its dark nest. Lessa crept back to the kitchen and into the cheese room.

  From the Weyr and from the Bowl

  Bronze and brown and blue and green

  Rise the dragonmen of Pern,

  Aloft, on wing, seen, then unseen.

  F’lar on bronze Mnementh’s great neck appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches. Behind him, in proper wedge formation, the wingmen came into sight. F’lar checked the formation automatically; as precise as at the moment of entry to between.

  As Mnementh curved in an arc that would bring them to the perimeter of the Hold, consonant with the friendly nature of this visitation, F’lar surveyed with mounting aversion the disrepair of the ridge defenses. The firestone pits were empty and the rock-cut gutters radiating from the pits were green-tinged with a mossy growth.

  Was there even one lord in Pern who maintained his Hold rocky in observance of the ancient Laws? F’lar’s lips tightened to a thinner line. When this Search was over and the Impression made, there would have to be a solemn, punitive Council held at the Weyr. And by the golden shell of the queen, he, F’lar, meant to be its moderator. He would replace lethargy with industry. He would scour the green and dangerous scum from the heights of Pern, the grass blades from its stoneworks. No verdant skirt would be condoned in any farmhold. And the tithings which had been so miserly, so grudgingly presented would, under pain of firestoning, flow with decent generosity into the Dragon weyr.

  Mnementh rumbled approvingly as he vaned his pinions to land lightly on the grass-etched flagstones of Fax’s Hold. The bronze dragon furled his great wings, and F’lar heard the warning claxon in the Hold’s Great Tower. Mnementh dropped to his knees as F’lar indicated he wished to dismount. The bronze rider stood by Mnementh’s huge wedgeshaped head, politely awaiting the arrival of the Hold lord. F’lar idly gazed down the valley, hazy with warm spring sunlight. He ignored the furtive heads that peered at the dragonman from the parapet slits and the cliff windows.