The farmers came in at noon, while Alice was still eating Hester’s bread.
There were six of them, mud to the thigh, with the look of men who had run the last kilometre because walking had felt like too little. The basket woman came behind them, then half the street. The door of the Lance banged against the wall. Marta’s bowl rocked on its shelf.
“It’s taking the goats,” said the first one, a red-faced man called Abner Pell. “Saw it myself. Came down off the mountain out of the last of the cloud, low as the trees. Two in its feet. Screaming.”
“The goats were screaming,” said the man behind him. “Not the beast. The beast was quiet.”
“That’s worse,” said the basket woman.
“Took four off the north slope. I counted the wingbeats. Big as sails.”
“Six from the gully.”
“It was in Widow Hale’s yard. In the yard. She came running down the lane in her apron.”
Gideon was on his feet at once, in his rabbit slippers, his sword half out of its scabbard. He had been coughing since dawn. “The storm’s made it hungry! It’s raiding! Alice, we ride... the company, the rope...”
“Fairweather,” said Hester, without looking up from her tea.
Gideon sat down.
Alice put the bread on the plate. Her stomach had gone very small. All year, in all those days on the mountain, she had never once seen the dragon come down off it hungry. She had been up there this very morning. The dragon had sat on the edge of the bed in a dead emperor’s robe, laughing.
She looked round the room for someone who knew something. Her eyes stopped on Dobbs.
He stood at the back by the door. He was as muddy as any of them. His hat was in his hands, which meant nothing, since it nearly always was. But he was not saying anything. Dobbs always said something.
“Dobbs,” Alice said. “Did it take yours?”
“Pen’s down,” said Dobbs. “Storm took the wall.”
“Did it take your goats?”
Dobbs turned the hat round once in his fingers. “It’s never taken one without...” He stopped. Everyone looked at him. “Without warning,” he said. “Is what I mean.”
“It’s never warned anybody in its life,” said Abner Pell.
“Well,” said Dobbs, “there’s warning. Then there’s warning.”
Alice stood up. Thirty kilos of plate stood up with her, which helped. “I’ll go.”
“I’ll come!”
“No,” said Alice, Hester, Marta, then, after a moment, Little Fen from the yard door.
* * *
Rakshaza had been at it since Alice’s horse went round the bend in the road.
The storm had done to the goats of the Redcrown what a dropped basket does to apples. She had found them everywhere. On ledges no goat could reach. Wedged in a gully with the water coming up. Standing in the top branches of a split pine, bleating at the morning with deep personal outrage. One small white nanny was on the very summit, on the crooked spine of rock above the snow, where only Rakshaza had ever been. She had no idea how it had got there. The goat did not seem to know either.
She knew every one of them. She had been looking at the goats of this mountain since before their great-grandmothers were kids. She knew the black one with the torn ear was Pell’s, the three brindled ones were from the gully farm, the fat white ones belonged to Widow Hale. She knew which pen every goat came from the way a person knows which drawer the spoons live in.
So she picked them up. Gently, in her hind talons, two at a time, in flight. They screamed the whole way. She set them down in their own yards, as softly as a dragon sets anything, then went back for more.
People saw. She knew they saw. A woman in an apron had run screaming down a lane. Rakshaza had let her run. It was very good for the reputation. It was also, she reflected, carrying the twentieth goat, the first time in three thousand years that anyone had screamed at her for giving something back.
The last farm was Dobbs’s.
His pen was a ruin. The storm had brought the hillside down against the wall. The flood had cut a new channel straight through the corner of the yard where the gatepost used to stand. Rakshaza set his two speckled goats down on the grass. She was turning to go when something in the raw mud caught the sun.
She landed. She looked.
It was a clay pot, split open by the water, half washed out of the earth under the old post. It was full of gold. Thin, worn, ancient gold, from kingdoms with no names left. Every coin she had ever left in this pen. She knew them. There was the square one with the hole in it. There were the little ones from the salt cities. Years of them. Two lifetimes of them. Father, then son.
None of them had been spent.
Rakshaza stood in the mud on all fours, looking at a farmer’s pot for much longer than a terrifying dragon had any reason to.
Then a door slammed up at the house. She went up into the air before anyone could reach the yard.
She had a note to see to. She had promised.
* * *
The circle was swept. There was a piece of paper in the exact middle of it, held down by the silver cup.
Alice stopped at the edge. Her heart did something complicated. She picked the paper up.
The hand was beautiful, old-fashioned, slanting, like something off a treaty.
Gone to see about the goats. Back by noon.
Do not eat the rest of the honey. Below it was the small claw-scratched flame, the one she had put under the rules instead of a name.
Alice read it four times. The first note. She had been promised one at a stile in a barley field, in the dark, with somebody holding her face. She had not thought it would ever come. She folded it very small. She put it in her belt pouch with the coin and the ivy leaf.
See about the goats. Her stomach went small again.
Then there was a sound at the mouth of the cave like a ship putting up all its sails at once. Light went out of the tunnel. The dragon came in to land on the ledge, hind legs first, wings back, with two fat white goats hanging from her talons. She let them down onto the rock very gently, from about the height of a table. The goats hit the ledge, looked about, then bolted straight up the tunnel into the hoard. Coins flew. Something fell over with a clang.
The dragon came down onto all fours. She folded her wings. She saw Alice standing in the circle.
“You’re early,” she said.
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“Six farmers came into the Lance at noon,” said Alice. “Mud to the knee. They say you’re raiding.”
“Do they.” The dragon looked pleased for an instant. Then she looked past Alice into the cave, where something was eating something it shouldn’t. “Those two are Widow Hale’s. I’ll need to take them back.
They wouldn’t hold still on her side of the hill.”
“Take them back.”
“The storm scattered them over half the mountain. One was on the summit. I don’t know how.” There was the shimmer, the heat, the skitter of coins. Then Rakshaza was standing at the threshold in human shape. She wore undyed cream wool today, a working sort of dress, sleeves pushed above the elbow, mud to the hem. She did not seem to have noticed the mud. “I’ve been at it all morning. Twenty-three. Twenty-five with those two.” This chapter was copied from novelping . com without permission.
“You’ve been returning them.”
“Of course I’ve been returning them.”
“Why?”
“Because they aren’t mine,” said Rakshaza, as if Alice were being slow. “I haven’t paid for them.”
The silence was very short. Then Rakshaza’s face changed.
“Paid for them,” said Alice.
“Hero.”
“You pay for the goats.”
“Forget I said that.”
“You pay...”
“I said forget it.” The ear tips had gone from rose to crimson in one breath. “Strike me with something. Insult my mother. Anything.”
* * *
It had been in the fourth month of the year. Alice remembered it because she had been so angry she could not eat her pie.
She had come up the mountain that morning past Widow Hale’s farm, where a woman with six children stood in a yard counting goats with her hands shaking. One was gone. The fattest. Taken in the night. Alice had looked at those six children, then ridden up the Redcrown hotter than she had ever ridden.
“You ate Widow Hale’s goat.”
The dragon had been lying on the hoard with her eyes half shut. “Did I? Which one was that?”
“She has six children!”
“Then I imagine she was compensated.” A great lazy yawn. “Don’t fuss, Hero.”
Alice had thought it was the cruellest thing she had ever heard. She had struck the dragon nine times in a row that day, hard enough to ring the coins. She had thrown the rest of her pie at her. The dragon had eaten the pie.
* * *
“Compensated,” said Alice.
Rakshaza closed her eyes. “You remember that.”
“I threw my pie at you.”
“I remember the pie.” She opened her eyes again. “Twice what the goat was worth. In gold. In the corner of her pen, under the straw, where the children wouldn’t find it before she did.” A pause. “She’d mentioned the children. Somebody mentioned them to me at the top of her voice. So I left a little more.”
Alice sat down on the edge of the circle. She did not mean to. Her legs did it.
“How long?”
“Since I woke up.” Rakshaza looked away into the hoard, towards the sounds of a goat finding the emperor’s robe. “Before I went to sleep too. Before your kingdom. Since... always, I suppose.”
“Why?”
For a while she did not answer. The goats clattered among the silver plates.
“The first goat I ever took,” Rakshaza said at last, “was a very long time ago. I was very young. There was a boy with it. Smaller than Fen. He didn’t run. He stood in the field holding the empty rope, crying, looking up at me. I didn’t know what money was. I didn’t know what anything was, really.” She lifted one shoulder. “I gave him a cup out of my hoard. It was the first thing I could reach. Gold, with a blue stone in it. He stopped crying. He looked at it. Then he looked up at me as if I’d done something marvellous.”
“So you kept doing it.”
“So I’ve never once taken a goat I didn’t pay for.” Rakshaza’s tail moved in a slow, embarrassed curl behind her. “If that got out, Hero. If one single person in this realm found out that the Red Storm, the Terror of the Redcrown, buys her dinner. Like a cook at the market.”
“Nobody will find out.”
“Your farmers are all in the inn saying I’m a raider. That’s good. Leave them there. That’s where they belong.” She hesitated. “Except.”
“Except?”
Rakshaza told her about the pot under Dobbs’s gatepost.
Alice listened to the whole of it. The square coin with a hole in it. The salt-city ones. Father, then son. Not one spent.
“He’s never spent them,” said Rakshaza. She sounded baffled. “Fifty years. Not one. I don’t understand it. That’s what they’re for. That’s the whole point of gold, it’s the only thing it’s good for. I would know.”
Alice thought of Dobbs, at the back of the common room, turning his hat. There’s warning. Then there’s warning.
“I think I understand it,” she said.
“Then tell me.”
“You can’t spend a thing like that. Who’d you say gave it to you?” Alice looked up at her. “You’d have to keep it. In a pot. Under the post. Where nobody could take it.”
Rakshaza looked at her for a long moment. Her face did nothing. Her tail did a great deal.
“Like a pauldron,” she said finally.
“Like a candle stub.”
Then she went to get the goats out of the robe, quickly, before her face could do anything else.
* * *
There were two problems with the goats, Alice said, once they had been extracted.
The first was that they had to go back to Widow Hale. The second was that the whole valley had seen the beast carry goats off into the sky. If goats now began coming back down out of the sky into yards, people would start to think.
“They should think,” said Rakshaza. “It would do them good.”
“They’d think you’d gone soft.”
Rakshaza took that very seriously. “Then you take them.”
So the Hero of Aurelmark rode down the Redcrown that afternoon with two fat white goats roped behind Turnip, who did not like it. Alice had carried them down the cliff in a sack between two ropes. The dragon had lowered the sack. Not with her talons. She had held the rope in her jaws, leaning out over the edge of the ledge on all fours, with an expression of terrible dignity. Halfway down, one of the goats had put its head out of the sack, looked her in the eye, then bleated.
Alice had decided not to say anything about that, ever.
There had also been a third goat. Not one of Widow Hale’s. Very small, very young, so new its legs had not finished deciding which way they went. Rakshaza had found it in the gully that morning, alone, half drowned, too small to carry in talons without frightening it to death. She had flown it up in one careful hind foot, then put it somewhere warm. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
The somewhere warm had been Gideon’s campaign cloak, off the marble king.
“I’m not taking it off,” Rakshaza said. “It’s asleep. It’s been through enough.”
“It’s Gideon’s cloak.”
“Then he’ll be glad it’s been useful. He’s that sort.” She tucked the gold-trimmed hem round the small sleeping face. “Its mother’s at the gully farm. Brindled. Very loud. You’ll know her.”
So Alice rode the last two kilometres into Brackenford with a baby goat in an oiled-leather cloak in the crook of her left arm, two goats on a rope behind, her face set in the expression of a woman who has wrested them from the jaws of the beast.
* * *
The town was waiting. It always was.
Somebody saw the goats. Then somebody saw the bundle. Then somebody rang the small bright bell, three times, which it had never been rung for before, because nobody had ever thought of ringing a bell for goats.
“She got them back!”
“Out of the lair!”
“Out of its jaws!”
Widow Hale came pushing through the crowd in her apron with four of her six children behind her. She took the rope from Alice’s hand. She looked at her goats. She looked at Alice. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then said only, “Thank you, Dame,” very low, in a voice that did not quite match the cheering round her.
Alice met her eyes for a moment.
“They were on the north side,” she said. “Out of the storm. Somebody kept them dry.”
Widow Hale’s mouth twitched. She took her goats home.
The gully farmer’s wife took the kid. The brindled mother, who had come down the lane at a dead run on hearing a bleat, nearly knocked them both over. Then there was only the cloak, gold-trimmed, oiled, slightly chewed at one corner, with a smell of goat about it that would never come out.
Gideon took it from her in both hands as if it were a banner from a lost war.
“It sent my cloak back,” he said. “Wrapped round a child. A goat child. Alice, do you understand what this means?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“It entrusted the young to me. It knows I’d protect them!” His eyes were full. He sneezed. “It’s... it’s a gesture. Between...”
“Don’t,” said Hester, from the door of the Lance.
Gideon closed his mouth. He held the cloak to his chest. It smelled very strongly of goat. He did not seem to mind in the least.
* * *
Dobbs found Alice in the stable yard, while she was rubbing Turnip down.
He stood by the gate for a while first, turning his hat. Turnip, who liked Dobbs, put his nose in the hat. Dobbs let him.
“Got my two back this morning,” he said. “Before you went up.”
“Good.”
“Found them in the yard. Standing there. Like they’d come home on their own.” He turned the hat the other way. “Pen’s gone. Storm took the corner. Took the post.”
“I heard.”
Dobbs looked up at her. Alice looked back. Neither of them said anything for long enough that Turnip got bored and took his nose out of the hat.
“My father had a pot,” said Dobbs. “Under the post. Started it when I was a boy. I kept it after. Never told anyone. My wife didn’t know.” He paused. “Who’d believe it?”
“Nobody,” said Alice.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Is the pot all right?”
“It’s in the kitchen. Under the bread crock.” He put the hat back on his head, which he almost never did. “It always paid, you know. My grandfather said so. Not one goat it didn’t pay for.”
“I know.”
Dobbs looked at her a moment longer. Then he nodded slowly, the way Marta nodded when she had been answered.
“Don’t you tell anyone,” he said.
“Don’t you.”
He went off down the lane in the late sun, a muddy man in a hat, with a pot of gold under his bread crock that he would never spend. Alice watched him go. She put her hand on her belt pouch, where the note was folded very small.
Do not eat the rest of the honey.
* * *
Inside, Pip was already on his stool. He had found a rhyme for goat.
Into the lair the hero strode where never shepherd dared to go; she took the goats from out its throat, the beast gave up the goats... with woe. “With woe,” said Hester.
“I’m working on it.”
Across the room, Gideon sat by the fire with his campaign cloak over his knees, picking straw out of the gold trim one piece at a time. Beside his chair, on a length of string, stood the gully farm’s brindled kid. Its mother had followed it all the way back down the lane. Then, at the door of the Lance, the kid had seen Gideon, walked straight past its mother, then sat down on his rabbit slippers.
It would not get off. Its mother was in the yard, very loud, eating Marta’s cabbages.
“I’m calling him Valour,” said Gideon.
Marta looked at the kid, then at her cabbages through the window. “Valour sleeps in the stable.”
“Then so do I,” said Gideon.
“Good,” said Hester.