Childe #08 - The Chantry Guild by Gordon R. Dickson

Author:Gordon R. Dickson [Dickson, Gordon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Unknown
ISBN: 9780812575590
Google: XKG8J8Rv6_UC
Amazon: 0812575598
Publisher: Orion
Published: 1988-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Hal woke at his usual time, something less than an hour before dawn. He had only had some five hours of sleep, but that would be sufficient for the day to come. He rose, showered and dressed, out of the habit ingrained in his boyhood as Donal, in completely clean clothes. Any morning with the chance of battle meant a clean body and clean clothes if that were possible. Many other things besides needle guns could make wounds; and soiled clothing pushed into a wound could carry infection deep into the body. There was little to no chance of his being hurt this day, but old habits had been triggered.

They made him sad and the sadness wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak as he began the day. There was no respite.

m the time word of his uncle James's death had come to im in Donal's boyhood, until the present moment, the birth of each day had brought a dragon to fight. Long since, now, he had thought he would have found the nest in the human soul from which such dragons came and have destroyed it, ending them all. But still they came. Once again he was at a morning on which he dressed with the possibility in mind of having to fight for the lives of himself and others. It was as if nothing had been accomplished from his youngest years until now.

Perhaps there was no such thing as ending it. Perhaps the best he could settle for was to meet each new dragon each day, do the best he could with it, and count that as victory. At least he would have fought the breed while he could. He would have done his duty. But what was duty, if that was all that was done?

Back into his mind came a book he had read when he was young. He remembered a verbal exchange in Conan Doyle's novel Sir Nigel, written at the beginning of the twentieth century and laid in the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century had been a time when duty was a common word among the upper classes, in its French form of devoir. The words he had just remembered were part of a passage in which there had been an angry exchange involving Sir Robert Knolles, the leader of the group of English men-at-arms and archers to which Nigel Loring, then still only a squire, belonged. It was a dispute between the experienced Knolles and a hot-headed but inexperienced young knight, Sir James Astley, concerning a skirmish into which Astley had gotten himself and those with him.

'. . . I have done my devoir as best I might,' said Astle.y. 'Alone, I had ten of them at my sword point. I know not how have lived to tell it.' ' What is your devoir to me? Where are my thirty bowmen cried Knolles in bitter wrath. 'Ten lie dead upon the ground, and twenty are worse than dead in yonder castle . . . '

No, to fight another dragon every day might make a good show, but it made no difference.

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