Part 3 (1/2)

But several had gone to the Tree, had chewed through the ropes, and were attempting to topple it from the wagon. The Tree was swaying, the wagon creaking. It started to fall.

”No!”

Tireas was conjuring, but there was no time. Flebas ran to the wagon, lifted his hands, caught the Tree as it overbalanced on him.

His arms did not penetrate the Tree. Instead, the Tree entered him, flowed into his bones, stung its way through his limbs. Flebas watched as his arms turned wooden, then watery. The flesh reformed in new shapes, inhuman shapes.

And the change continued. He felt the magic pour into his chest, down his legs, rise up to shroud his face in a twisting gyre of transformation. He screamed, but it was a mewling, whining sound that spewed from his altered throat.

Sand was beneath him. Sand. Hands did not touch him. The feathered things were gone.

Dimly, he saw that Tireas was leaning over him.

”G.o.ds,” someone said. ”Look at his face.”

34.He tried to speak, but he felt blood in his throat. No, not blood. Something else.

Calrach turned away from him. Tireas shook his head. ”We cannot bring him with us.”

”We cannot leave him.”

”We cannot but leave him.”

And then they were gone. Flebas felt sand beneath him, saw a faint sun creep across the sky. With limbs that were no longer his own, he began to crawl. He did not know where he was going. He simply crawled, whimpering softly, leaving a wake of pale sand stained with the b.l.o.o.d.y sweat that oozed slowly, constantly, from what had once been his body.

Whatever it was doing, the Dragon took its time.

The paperweight remained empty during Solomon's short walk to the department, and when-after he nodded to Suzanne, who was waiting by the front desk-he set it down on the bookshelf in his office, it was still no more than a transparent gla.s.s sphere, uninhabited.

It was unusual for Silbakor to vanish with such a brief explanation. There had been an urgency in its last words that had made Solomon's hand itch for the Dragonsword, but without the Dragon, he was stranded in the mundane world of books and offices and ex-radical research a.s.sistants.

Suzanne knocked briefly. He had forgotten that she was waiting.

”You should have come in sooner,” he muttered, but he noticed the tight lines in her forehead that meant that she was having another headache. She groped her way to the chair beside his desk and sat down.

The bookshelf was behind Solomon, and he transferred the paperweight to the desk as he drew up a chair. If the Dragon came back, he wanted to know immediately. ”Did you get the materials from England?”

She winced as if antic.i.p.ating a beating. ”No. They wouldn't release them to me. You have to sign for them yourself.''

”d.a.m.ned idiots.” He saw that Suzanne was eyeing .

35.him suspiciously. Suzanne. Guardian of Gryylth. Laughable. ”You could have shown some gumption and pushed them. They might have given in.”

”I did. They didn't.”

”Hmmm.” He picked up the phone, dialed the library, asked for Special Collections. ”This is Dr. Braithwaite in Archaeology. I Ve some materials that came in on in-terlibrary loan.” He listened as the student tried to explain, cut him short. ”Yes, I know she did. You should have given them to her. I want those things sent up to my office right now.”

Suzanne's eyes were clenched as though his words were directed at her.

”Do it,” he said. ”Now. Or I'll have you fired.” He threw the handset back into its cradle. ”There. That wasn't so bad, was it?”

”He was just doing his job.”

He snorted. ”And I'm just doing mine. Do you know, that sort of individual is exactly the kind that made Rome lose Britain? It's true. Little budding bureaucrats looking out for number one. No sense of the daring. And the Brits themselves picked up all of that. Of course, the Saxons weren't much of an alternative. They didn't care about anything except loot. But the little Roman-style bureaucrats couldn't do anything when they broke out of their territory and started to rip up the towns.”

Suzanne nodded curtly, seemed to realize that she was being impolite, and made a visible effort to control herself. ”Sorry, Doctor. Headache. I'll be OK.”

”Sure you don't want to go home?”

She looked at him curiously, defied him and the migraine both. ”What were you saying about the Saxons?”

He was testing her, and she was rising to the bait. ”They were your archetypal barbarians, Suzanne. You know that: you've seen the sources. They had no conception of higher culture, and what they didn't understand, they tried to destroy. And they would have destroyed everything, too, if Arthur and Ambrosius hadn't held them off.”

Suzanne shook her head. ”I thought Layc.o.c.k's re- 36.search had torpedoed that theory. There's no evidence of widespread disruption during that period.”

”Gildas recounted the destruction,” said Solomon. ”He had no good reason to lie. That's why I want to look at the original of the De excidio. There might have been a misreading of some key words that would remove all the ambiguity.”

”And the Layc.o.c.k stuff?”

”He was too wrapped up in his theories. I think he ignored evidence. I want to see for myself.”

Suzanne clung to her point. ' 'If the Saxons had burned everything, there'd be evidence. Boudicca left evidence, and she certainly wasn't as widespread as the Saxons.”

Leave it to Suzanne, he thought, to use a woman for an example.

”Besides,” she went on, ”if they had been that bad, they wouldn't have settled down so readily and put their energies into building a country.''

The radicals had settled down, too. Nice little jobs. Nice little families. They had raised h.e.l.l and then they had been swallowed up by the very thing they had fought. ”Nice little bureaucrats,” he said.

The headache was sharpening her tongue. ”Whose side are you on, Braithwaite?”

Whose side, he wondered, was she herself on? ”I'm a professor at a university,” he said. ”I'm on the side of civilization. I always have been.” His voice was flat. ”I hope you understand that.”

She put her hands to her temples, and nodded. But as Solomon sat back, trying to find some savor in his words, a flash of yellow from the paperweight caught his eye.

The Dragon had returned.

”Maybe you ought to call it a day, Suzanne,” he said quickly. ”Why don't you go home and go to bed?”

She had followed his gaze. ”I didn't know you had a paperweight like that.” Her voice was dull with habitual pain. ”Whatever made you choose a horned toad?”

Silbakor was unmoving. Only Solomon knew that it was alive. Only Solomon could read the tension in every line of its iron-colored body. ”It's not a horned toad,”

37.he found himself saying as he tried to think of a way to bring the appointment to an end. ”It's a dragon. It's too thin, you see, to be a horned toad. You can see the wings, too. Now-”

”Yeah.” h.e.l.ling was leaning forward as if fascinated by the unblinking eyes. With a sense of rising panic, Solomon recalled how he himself had paused in the antique shop, almost hypnotized, when he had first found the Dragon.