Meanwhile, the shape plunging in blackness wavered and was replaced by a ball of downy feathers. The owl Saara had become tumbled and lost a few secondaries before recovering in the air, then rose again to soar in wide circles around the battle.
What she saw was a different scene from that she had just left, for the black dragon had a wealth of stored fires and twenty years of stored hate. Once free of the necessity to protect his head, he fought with a savagery that seemed beyond the reach of pain.
He had Lucifer's foot in his mouth and one claw beneath the Devil's long jaw, holding both tooth and fire useless. The white dragon, at the same time, had wrapped his serpentine tail around the black's muzzle and was striking viciously with its edged tip at the other's eyes.
Saara circled, hooting dim, owlish encouragements to her champion, who had now forced his other claw to the Devil's throat and was attempting to strangle him. The white dragon was kicking the black's belly like a fighting tomcat.
Regardless of the dripping wound in his neck the black dragon held on. He caught one of his enemy's punishing hind feet in his own and twisted the white's lower body around so that he kicked only air. When Lucifer's front claws found the tear in the flesh of the black dragon's neck and worried it open, he not only ignored the pain, but was not aware of it at all.
Could a mortal creature, however strong or ancient, destroy a spirit? A great spirit? The dragon considered this question in a dry and academic manner while his mouth uttered his rage and talons squeezed and squeezed.
Although the Mahayana philosopher, Nagarjuna, admitted various levels of spirit and matter, nothing among them was imperishable (except the atman, or breath, according to certain other Indians). Therefore this dragon before him (who might contain breath, but was certainly not purely breath) might well be perishable.
But the Japanese, now, like Dogen, tended to put change above all, and did not exclude breath from its dominion. THAT would imply that this white dragon neck between his claws was susceptible to infinite alteration, no matter what its spiritual character.
Where does the flame go, when a candle is blown out?
The dragon, deep in such reflections, snapped his mouth over that of his white enemy, both pinning its jaws shut and cutting off air. He threw his shoulders into the cause of metaphysical experiment until the silver throat caved in beneath him.
The pale body writhed wildly and was still. But a voice from the air spoke, saying, “I think I am getting bored with all this.”
The white dragon went out.
Like a candle.
The black dragon floated through the air as limply as a weary swimmer. His fire-washed sides were dull under the starlight, and black blood oozed down his length, dripping at last from his tail to the earth far below. His head snaked left, then right, but his amber eyes found nothing.
Except a tiny feathered shape that darted in above the lofting heats and sat on his nose. “Quick! There. Follow while he flees, or it will be for nothing!”
“Follow what?” asked the dragon patiently. Saara sprang from his muzzle to his outstretched hand. She took human form and pointed at nothing-at-all among the stars.
“There. The bright shadow. Can't you see?”
Snapping his tail behind him, the enormous beast shot forward, enclosing Saara in a cage of black tines. “Certainly I can see. I see Betelgeuse and Rigel and a host of lesser luminaries, and I see the moon in her half-phase. I see the Mediterranean Alps beneath and I see your little friend disappearing into the window we have sought so long. What else should I be seeing?”
“The Liar! He shines like rotting fish.
“Follow where I point,” added the witch, as she saw that the dragon had no more eye for magic than had Gaspare.
“Now up!” she shrilled, and suddenly, “Turn, turn to your left! Sharper.”
The dragon obeyed, though growling softly to himself. The earth beneath them reeled repeatedly, with white stone and black pine tilting like beer in a rolling barrel. But Saara was too intent for dizziness now. “Up, up!” she cried ferociously. “Faster or we will lose him.”
But the dragon's climb slowed, though his tail beat the air below them so fast Saara could barely see it. It slowed and stopped, and finally they began to fall.
“Too high for fire,” whispered the dragon faintly, and they floated, loose as a rope in the ocean, down toward the gleaming earth below.
There were some moments of silence, during which Saara stretched out on the five-fingered hand of iron. “So it is,” she admitted ruefully.
They sank, weariness establishing its mastery over both of them. The dragon began to ache.
“That was a famous battle,” Saara remarked. “If I were a poet, I would make a saga about it.”
The dragon, however, growled glumly. “What does it matter how it went, when I failed you?”
The witch sat up and peered behind them at the black and starry sky. “Failed me? How? Did you expect to split the sky in two? You would have done that before killing the Liar, who was never bora.”
“Then what were we after?” The yellow eyes, bigger and brighter than torches, looked down at her.
“The answer to a question,” replied Saara, who continued to stare into space. “I must find Raphael, the Eagle Chief.”
The dragon puzzled. “But we failed in that too. He gave us no time to ask, and now he is gone beyond chasing.”
“No,” the tiny woman corrected him. “He is not beyond chasing. In fact he is coming back at this moment.”
Then the stars spun about as the black dragon swiveled in place. “Where?”
“Coming,” repeated Saara, calmly. “He wears no shape.” Changing her own shape once again, she darted, a round, fluffy owl, behind the dragon's head spines. “I will tell you where he goes,” she whispered, “and what he does.”
“He is below you,” said the owl. “What do you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what do you feel?”
The dragon slashed with his tail. “Loathing,” he hissed through set teeth.
Again the owl peeped and chattered. “Now he is beside you. Can you sense him?”
The dragon's back scales scraped together. “I feel only⦠disgust,” he said, but Saara thought he might have used another word but for pride.
“Now he is aboâ” hooted the owl, but at that moment a shape hurtled toward her, and Saara threw herself fluttering to the left.
It was an eagle, and it was shining white. It pursued the rotund owl in the air with a skill equal to her own. Twice it chased her around the dragon's very head, pressing so closely she had not the time to hide herself among the projecting spines.
The dragon craned his neck wildly, but the birds were too tiny and too close for him to touch. Like a hawk mobbed by ravens, he sank away from the combat in the air.
But owls do not give battle with eagles, or at least not for long. One of the eagle's talons struck, taking a handful of feathers from the owl and scattering them. She flapped, off-balance, towards the dragon's protective head. The satanic eagle followed, growing closer.
The dragon saw his chance and took it. He opened his mouth and let the owl flutter through. His crocodilian jaw snapped shut on the eagle. The wounded owl fluttered down on his hand.
“Now I will not ask, but demand,” said Saara, whose dress hung in tatters stained with blood. She motioned to be brought nearer the dragon's mouth.
“Liar!” she called. “Now you will take us to Raphael. You will release him from his bondage. Or you will spend a long time in a very dark place!”
There was silence, and the dragon clenched his jaw. Then he gagged, for suddenly out of his mouth and nose was pouring streams of matter.
They were hideous, the white-blue of phosphorescent, decaying flesh, and they crawled. They erupted from the dragon's mouth faster than he could spit them out, and they scrabbled over his body. They came down his hand and claw and reached Saara.
They could bite. They could burrow into flesh. Saara screamed, while the dragon belched helpless fire that lapped his sides but did nothing to discourage the infestation. In a panic of horror Saara watched the scum of pale blue disappear between the dragon's scales.
He writhed like a back-broken snake. In a moment surely he would close his hand and crush her. Saara herself lay in a ball on the black palm of the dragon's hand, clawing at a body that had gone slippery with blood.
Like thistledown the black dragon floated down through the high airs. He touched the stone of the peak and rolled as limp as a leather strap, all the way down to the road.
Chapter 8
Where had his pride gone, Gaspare asked himself. He had not felt so shaken since the bad days: the days he tried never to think about, the days before Damiano, when he had been nobody, but bare feet on the streets of San Gabriele.
He watched the Lady Saara ascend into the sky on her serpentine steed, knowing he had been put on a shelf, while she and the dragon were out to confront the Devil. Yet proud Gaspareâman of many tempestsâhad said nothing against the plan. Yes, he would continue along the road, in the unlikely event the Devil had placed the entrance to his eyrie in plain sight. Yes, he would watch the befuddled horse.
Truth was, Gaspare was fit for nothing else, for he had run out of strength. Entering the worm hole had drained him of bravery in no ordinary manner, while his encounter with the dragon itself had left him with a dull feeling that anything might happen next and there was naught that could be done about it.
The high air (or lack of it) was much to blame for the redhead's shakiness, but, child of the mountains that he was, he did not connect the peaks around him with his intense desire to sit down on the road and shut his eyes.
He leaned against Festilligambe: not a good idea, for the horse was in no condition to support his weight. “Come, old outlaw,” grumbled the redhead. “Wake up and show some fight!”
Festilligambe hauled up one ear, but made no other response to Gaspare's urging. Staring into the gelding's round brown eyes, Gaspare thought he saw reflections of amber.
“What has he done to you, ass-face? You look like old Lucia after her third tankard.” The youth twisted Festilligambe's black tail (heavy by nature, thinned by two much standing near the fire) as though the horse were a pig. A groan was the only result.
Festilligambe's paralysis conquered Gaspare's. His spirits rose to contempt for the addled beast. “Snap out of it, horse. It was just a big lizard, you know. A dumb brute like yourself.”
Suddenly there came a whistling shriek from somewhere above and ahead, accompanied by booming curses and followed by a great hiss of engines. “Or a brute, at any rate,” Gaspare added with less cockiness. “Come on. We can't stay here.”
To his left rose a slope of rock and rubble, rising to the sharp tooth of the mountain. On the right the slope fell again in increasing steepness. Gaspare did not move to the gravel-scattered edge to look over, for there was an uncomfortable cold wind.
Ahead of him a spur rose at the right of the road, amidst the scree, so there would be protection from both sides. Protection from the wind, at any rate. Gaspare tweaked Festilligambe's ear and prodded one thumb knuckle into his ribs, but the horse did not respond. At last he drew back, cocked his foot, and spun around, landing an impressive roundhouse kick just below the gelding's limply hanging tail.
Slowly the horse swayed forward. Slowly he began to move.
Gaspare entered the protection of the rocks. When the road veered away to the left, following the base of the peak, he clipped the skin of Festilligambe's nostril between two fingers and led him around.
A shrieking roar blasted the rocks. Gaspare gazed up in time to see the dragons, white and black, rise twining into the high air. A horrid glory of flame brightened the evening sky.
Gaspare fell to his knees, not knowing it was Satan himself who assaulted his friend in the air, but knowing it was terrible. “I am useless,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. “By God and all His saints, I want to hide!” He hid his face in his hands.
The bellowing faded as the combatants rose farther from the road itself. Gaspare, folding his hands in half-shamed prayer, looked ahead and beheld the yellow light of a lamp.
In front of him, along the road itself, was a window. It extended from the gravel and dust of the earth to a peak at least twenty feet up, and the stone trim around it was as neat and pretty as that of a church. It was the kind of window one could walk through, having neither shutter nor glass. Inside it was a room.
As Gaspare stood perched on the sill, a light spatter of flame licked the stone of the road behind him. Acid hissed and crackled against stone. The youth hopped through, down the two-foot drop to the interior floor, which was tiled quite fashionably in the Italian manner.
“So,” he said. “Even as Delstrego described it.”
Delstrego had visited the Devil. He had told Gaspare all about it.
But the redhead hadn't listened, exactly, because it had been back in the days when he thought Delstrego was⦠well, confused.
But he DID remember that the Devil's high chamber had been big âso big that a man might sit on a table as large as a ballroom floor. “Not quite as Delstrego described it,” Gaspare amended.
Here was a table. Gaspare put his hand upon it. About two arm spans by one-and-a-half, he judged. On it were two things: a rather impressively made model of a fortress, and a bowl of grapes. Besides the table, the only furnishings in the room were a single high-backed chair, various loud and busy scarlet embroideries on the walls, and a red leather bag hanging from the ceiling lamp.
Gaspare's curious fingers played with a tiny steel shutter which hung on one of the few windows of the model. It worked. He peered inside the arched windows on the tiny cupola which topped the model. There was something in it, but he couldn't make out what. By habit he plucked a grape from the bowl and brought it to his mouth.