Dragon Sword Series - Dragon Sword Part 14

"What of Alouzon?"

"She is a puzzle. I do not know. Regardless, Cvinthil: Dythragor, Marrget, and the First Wartroop must be summoned. Will you-"

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Cvinthil did not wait for the order. "I will go and be glad, my king.".

First light was not far oif: the sky was graying already. "See if you can convince Alouzon to help us, Cvinthil," said Vorya. "She seems friendly towards you, and I fear we will need her.''

"She is a woman, my king. Do you think that ..."

Vorya shrugged, feeling cold. The Dremords wanted the Circle, and Dythragor was acting willful. He decided that it was time to take a hand in governing Gryylth, Dythragor or no Dythragor. "The Dragon brought her," he said, "just as the Dragon brought Dythragor. I think, perhaps, that we must accept Alouzon Dragonmaster for what she is, for whatever she has to give us."

* CHAPTER 9 *

he Star of David that Sandy wore flashed silver in the JL morning light as she and Suzanne ate bagels, cream cheese, and apples for breakfast. Her roommates were sleeping in, and the big house was quiet except for the gurgling of the coffeemaker and the barking of the dog that lived down the street. Kent as a whole seemed subdued today, a small Ohio college town, nothing more, suburbs and business district shaking off the excesses of a weekend of disturbances-rioting on Friday, burning on Sat.u.r.day, the arrival of the National Guard on Sunday-trying to rise this Monday morning and face the day with something approaching equanimity.

Sandy had morning cla.s.ses, but there was time for breakfast and coffee with Suzanne. Since she had left the confines of the dormitories, she had, in Suzanne's opinion, fairly blossomed: an already likable girl becoming more likable with freedom and a chance to set her own schedules and priorities. Sandy worried about being an old maid, but everyone knew that she would eventually marry, and everyone knew also that it would be a storybook relations.h.i.+p, giving and taking throughout the years, loving as pa.s.sionately as her large heart was capable.

She's going to die today ...

Suzanne stared at her hands, cupped now around a mug of coffee. How did she know that? There was unrest on the campus, and the Guardsmen had arrived, but everyone knew that they would never shoot at anyone. Tear gas, maybe; bullets, no.

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The clock on the wall said eight-thirty. The calendar's days had been crossed out up to the fourth of May. 1970.

1970?.

She kept her thoughts to herself, but a kind of a panic was welling up inside her like a spring suddenly flooding into a mine. Sandy was going to ...

"And then there he was again," Sandy was saying as she laughed about Jeff Miller's latest appearance. "Just truckin' on by. Just truckin' on by, he said."

"So, uh, what did you do?"

"What we always do." She smiled warmly. "We fed him."

Outside, the morning unfolded like & yellow flower. Suzanne helped herself to more coffee, feeling her presentiment growing. The hot liquid burned her mouth when she drank. "You going to the rally at noon?"

"I'm not sure. Is it still on? You know, Governor Rhodes read the riot act and everything."

"Did he?"

"Well, I think he did."

"No one told anyone in the dorms about it."

Sandy shrugged. "Who is to say, then?" The phrase was an old joke, and she uttered it now in the appropriately mournful tones. But her dark brown eyes were serious.

Suzanne had spent the night penned up in the Tri-Towers dorms, a prisoner of the confused curfew laws that had descended upon both the campus and the city. Along with a crowd of other students, she had been chased into the buildings by a squad of National Guardsmen who were, themselves, apparently unsure of the legal status of the situation. "They meant business last night. I saw bayonets."

"I wish that everyone could just sit down and talk." A crease of worry had appeared between Sandy's eyes. She looked at her watch. "I've got cla.s.s, Sue. I have to go."

"Don't worry, I'll clean up."

Sandy gathered up her books, slung her purse from her shoulder, pulled a strand of dark brown hair free of the strap. A clock radio went on upstairs, WKSU playing the Doors' "The End."

Sandy waved, smiled, and headed out the door. Cvin-thil met her on the sidewalk, and they talked together for a moment before the councilor and the student went off holding hands.

Suzanne touched her face. She felt cold in spite of the early spring suns.h.i.+ne, but her perceptions were clear.

I'm dreaming. Aren't I?

She was not sure. Upstairs, Sandy's roommate was rising, stumping across the hall to the bathroom, running the shower, flesh bare to the cascade of water that pum-meled it like so many bullets. The Doors were still playing.

' 'The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on . . ."

The fourth of May. 1970. Sandy was . . .

Her mind almost blank, Suzanne piled the breakfast dishes into the sink and ran for the door.

"... and he walked on down the hall ..."

In contrast to the faint transparency of Gryylth, Kent State was hard and definite. The black squirrels glinted in shades of gun metal as they frisked from tree to tree, and the breeze rose and fell mechanically, predictably, uncompromisingly. Equally hard and equally definite were the Guardsmen, the tanks, the armored personnel carriers-the shadows they cast were solid, as though chiseled out of jet, or burned into the ground.

Suzanne ran down Summit Street, crossed into the campus by McGilvrey Hall, and headed for the Student Union. For a moment, she stood on Blanket Hill, the cla.s.sic lines of Taylor Hall, columned and windowed, rising up on one side of her as though to defy the burned-out hulk of the ROTC building that lay some tens of yards away. She did not see Sandy.

The clock tower tolled 9 a.m., and the hill was already dotted with students who were enjoying the warm suns.h.i.+ne, spreading both blankets and books, turning the gra.s.sy slope into an outdoor study hall. Couples bent over papers, exchanging kisses between pages, and Solomon Braithwaite appeared among them, strolling across 132the commons with a stack of books about Arthur and an index of Anglo-Saxon place names. He nodded at her. "It's about time," he said, indicating the Guardsmen with a flick of his head.

"They don't belong here," she said.

"After that riot Friday night on Water Street? You bet they do, girl."

"It was hardly a riot. You want a riot? You should look at Watts or Detroit."

"And what do you say about that?" He freed a hand and pointed at the ruin of the ROTC building. ' 'Kids just can't go around destroying public property like that."

"And you just can't go around sending kids off to get killed in Vietnam. Or is it Cambodia, now, Braithwaite? Nixon better make up his mind, or else."

"Or else what?"

She was silent for a moment. Where was Sandy? Here she was, arguing theory, when a friend was going to die.

How the f.u.c.k do I know that?

She brought her head up suddenly, stared Solomon in the face. "Is this a dream?"

He looked at her. "What if it is? What difference does it make?'' His tone was that of a father speaking to a spoiled child: indulgent, patronizing. "They'll still bury you all. And they'll do it again and again and-"

"I'm going to be out there at noon, Braithwaite."

"Fine. I'll be at rny desk. Or maybe . . ."He looked over at the Guard. "Or maybe I'll borrow an-M-1. Or a sword."

He started to walk away, his back straight, determined.

Fade. s.h.i.+mmer. Montage of trees tossing in the breeze, students gathering on Blanket Hill (Taylor Hall behind them, a suitable backdrop), faces ranging from bewildered to angry, a hand reaching for the rope of the Victory Bell, the Guard in motion. Sounds: screams, catcalls, General Canterbury barking out instructions on a bullhorn, the incessant ringing of the bell. The sun moves in the sky from a shallow thirty-degree angle to a perpendicular ninety.

The rally to protest the invasion of Cambodia was be- .

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ginning jerkily, interrupted by the efforts of the Guard to disperse it. Bullhorn and Victory Bell alternated in discordant antiphony. A jeep cruised toward and away from the students, the guardsmen giving orders, the students ignoring them, tear gas blowing in frothy clouds that choked soldier and scholar alike.

Some were still trying to study. A few walked away in disgust. And there were still others who stood on the brick housing of the bell and shouted about the war.

Suzanne could not hear what they were saying. Distances-or maybe years-separated her from their rhetoric. They seemed little different from Dythragor and his strutting and haranguing, and the end of all of it was the same. The rodent-like burghers of Bandon, the fat generals who planned battles and falsified their outcomes, the swaggering and c.o.c.ky professional agitators who blew into town to make trouble-no different from one another, really, all having their fingers in the b.l.o.o.d.y pie up to the elbows.

And then she saw Sandy. She had decided to come to the rally after all, but had given up as the violence built. Wiping the tear gas off her face with kleenex, she stumbled out of Johnson Hall and began crossing toward Music and Speech, where her 1:10 cla.s.s was held. Her feet hit the asphalt of the R-58 parking lot with even sounds like the ticking of a clock.

Cvinthil, mild and polite, was pa.s.sing out leaflets at the edge of the crowd. Vorya stood with folded arms, watching from the wide porch around Taylor Hall, his face old and lined, the peace symbol on his headband faded into an indistinguishable blur.

She was about to run after Sandy when a woman with ash blond hair caught at her sleeve. "Do you know me?" she said. "Can you tell me who I am? I caught some of the tear gas a few minutes ago, and now everything has changed." Her manner was formal, as though she were just out of the military, but her gray eyes were frank, open. She did not seem to be suffering from tear gas.

"I. . ." Suzanne peered at her. "I don't think I know you. Have you seen Allison?"

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"Alouzon," the woman corrected. "I am looking at her."

It's a dream. It has to be a dream.

Jeff was running in the distance, middle fingers raised toward the Guard. "Pigs off campus, you motherf.u.c.kers!" His dark hair flashed in the clear sun, and he looked too young to be protesting a war. Just a boy, really, playing at growing up, preparing for an adulthood that he would not have.

The woman walked away, and Suzanne was left to struggle alone with this dream that was so much like reality. She bent down, touched the gra.s.s that was moist and humid with the growing heat of the day, straightened and watched the clouds of tear gas drifting across the commons as the Guard attempted to clear it of demonstrators. Gas canisters flew back and forth from the Guard to the students and back again, like shuttlec.o.c.ks in a game of badminton.

It was a period piece she saw, old costumes-from miniskirts to beads and headbands-quaint and faintly ridiculous, like out-of-style clothes in faded black and white photographs of ancestors who looked out from the brittle paper with sternly bewildered expressions, facing a strange technology and a changing world.

Her steps took her away and over the hill as she followed in the wake of the phalanxed Guardsmen. Seena and Adyssa taunted the soldiers, their clear voices carrying the thirty yards or so that separated them from the uniformed men. The ash blond woman, thin and patrician, stood off at the side. Cvinthil offered Suzanne a leaflet, the doe-eyed warrior bowing courteously as he put the paper in her hand. "For you, Dragonmaster."

"Cvinthil, what's going on?"

He smiled and gestured at the paper, then left her.

She opened it. Save for the outline of a cup, the page was blank. She looked up, stared straight into the muzzle of an M-l, but it was Dythragor's face she saw behind the sights. She heard the click of the safety coming off, or maybe . . .

The firing started, a quick shot, then a pause, then a .

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thin spatter of reports. She saw the muzzle flash as Dy-thragor squeezed off a round, watched the bullet drift toward her.

A coed with hair the color of amber ran in front of her, took it square in the face, spun around and dropped onto her back, the ruin of her features examining the overly-blue sky critically, as though to comment on the weather.

Solomon Braithwaite walked off, marching with precision. The ash blond woman who did not know who she was came and knelt over the dead coed, lifted her eyes, spread her hands helplessly. Suzanne turned away from the blank horror on her face.

Down in the parking lot, Sandy was dead. Allison and Bill were dying. Jeff Miller was hardly recognizable.

". . . and he . . . he walked on down the hall..."

Laughter, humming: the sounds that worlds make when they turn and move. Suzanne stared at the parking lot, knowing that it did not have to be this way, that other outcomes of this day had always been possible, but knowing also with the razorlike pain of certainty that this was the way that it was. The other potentials had been left in the past, and the world had ground ma.s.sively onto this track, this path, and was even now rolling ...

She wanted the light. She wanted the radiance. In spite of the death, in spite of the uselessness of what she had seen, there was rea.s.surance in the world, too. She believed in the gold light, in the undeniable Presence that had intruded into her dreams before and brought with it a completion that filled the utter lack that had gaped open on this sunlit morning in May.

And as she believed, it came. Softly at first, and then with a growing brilliance as though the sun itself were reflected and redoubled from all sides, it came. Suzanne looked, saw, felt, knew the form and substance of a Cup, of a hand that held it, of the waters that welled up from it.

It was real. More real than Gryylth. More real even than her dream. Weeping, she fell to her knees, stretched 136.

out her arms. But the shooting began again, and it vanished into a glory of gold.

"... This is the end, my only friend. . .the end..."

Alouzon awoke with a cry. The early-morning sky was a blank, and Dythragor stood over her, grinning.

"Dreaming of the Heath?" he said.

She was too full of tears and wonder to take oifense. "No," she said. "Dreaming . . ." It seemed absurd to say it, but she had to, for what she had seen was both a goal and a promise, and it was good to admit to herself what it was. Despite the horror. Despite the absurdity.

"Dreaming of the Grail," she said softly. "I've seen it. I ... I think I can find it." The morning unfolded like a yellow flower. "I have to."

But Dythragor had already left, and her words were lost to all save herself.

As Marrget had said, there was no road that led north from Bandon, but the way was not difficult. The land was still rolling, gra.s.s-clad hills set with stands of trees, watered by streams, and the horses found their way easily.

The morning and the mundane-breakfast, breaking camp, saddling the horses, moving out-did not make her doubt what she had seen during the night. If anything, the continuing anomalies of Gryylth only made the vision more real. In this dreamlike land of dragons and magic, of an incomplete past and (at best) a doubtful present, the Grail was whole, certain. She did not have to know its history or its future: it simply was, forever. And it had appeared to her.

She took that as a hope. Somewhere, there was an end to the shattered existence that formed the chronicle of her last ten years. Somewhere in Gryylth was a final burial of Kent State. She would remember those who had died there-she would always remember-but she would be able to release them from the confines of her brooding mind, from the pit of her guilt, and they, like her, would be able to go on, into whatever existence, whatever life awaited them.