Stephen King - Eyes Of The Dragon (1987)

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.31MB 227 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Stephen King

The Eyes of the Dragon

Once, in a kingdom called Detain, there was a King with two sons. Detain was a very old

kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on

long enough, not even historians can remember everything. Roland the Good was neither

the best nor the worst King ever to rule the land. He tried very hard not to do anyone

great evil and mostly succeeded. He also tried ~ very hard to do great works, but,

unfortunately, he didn't succeed so well at that. The result was a very mediocre King; he

doubted if he would be remembered long after he was dead. And his death might come at

any time now, because he had grown old, and his heart was failing. He had perhaps one

year left, perhaps three. Everyone who knew him, and everyone who observed his gray

face and shaking hands when he held court, agreed that in five years at the very most a

new King would be crowned in the great plaza at the foot of the Needle . . . and it would

only be five years with God's grace. So everyone in the Kingdom, from the richest baron

and the most foppishly dressed courtier to the poorest serf and his ragged wife, thought

and talked about the King in waiting, Roland's elder son, Peter.

And one man thought and planned and brooded on something else: how to make sure that

Roland's younger son, Thomas, should be crowned King instead. This man was Flagg,

the King's magician.

Although Roland the King was old-he admitted to seventy years but was surely older than

that-his sons were young. He had been allowed to marry late because he had met no

woman who pleased his fancy, and because his mother, the great Dowager Queen of

Delain, had seemed immortal to Roland and to everyone else-and that included her. She

had ruled the Kingdom for almost fifty years when, one day at tea, she put a freshly cut

lemon in her mouth to ease a troublesome cough that had been plaguing her for a week or

better. At that particular teatime, a juggler had been performing for the amusement of the

Dowager Queen and her court. He was juggling five cun-ningly made crystal balls. Just

as the Queen put the slice of lemon into her mouth, the juggler dropped one of his glass

spheres. It shattered on the tiled floor of the great East Court-room with a loud report.

The Dowager Queen gasped at the sound. When she gasped, she pulled the lemon slice

down her throat and choked to death very quickly. Four days later, the coronation of

Roland was held in the Plaza of the Needle. The juggler did not see it; he had been

beheaded on the executioner's block behind the Needle three days before that.

A King without heirs makes everybody nervous, especially when the King is fifty and

balding. It was thus in Roland's best interest to marry soon, and to make an heir soon. His

close advisor, Flagg, made Roland very aware of this. He also pointed out that at fifty, the

years left to him in which he could hope to create a child in a woman's belly were only a

few. Flagg advised him to take a wife soon, and never mind waiting for a lady of noble

birth who would take his fancy. If such a lady had not come into view by the time a man

was fifty, Flagg pointed out, she probably never would.

Roland saw the wisdom of this and agreed, never knowing that Flagg, with his lank hair

and his white face that was almost

always hidden behind a hood, understood his deepest secret: that he had never met the

woman of his fancy because he had never really fancied women at all. Women worried

him. And he had never fancied the act that puts babies in the bellies of women. That act

worried him, too.

But he saw the wisdom of the magician's advice, and six months after the Dowager

Queen's funeral, there was a much happier event in the Kingdom-the marriage of King

Roland to Sasha, who would become the mother of Peter and Thomas.

Roland was neither loved nor hated in Delain. Sasha, however, was loved by all. When

she died giving birth to the second son, the Kingdom was plunged into darkest mourning

that lasted a year and a day. She had been one of six women Flagg had suggested to his

King as possible brides. Roland had known none of these women, who were all similar in

birth and station. They were all of noble blood but none of royal blood; all were meek

and pleasant and quiet. Flagg suggested no one who might take his place as the mouth

closest to the King's ear. Roland chose Sasha because she seemed the quietest and

meekest of the half- dozen, and the least likely to frighten him. So they were wed. Sasha

of the Western Barony (a very small barony indeed) was then seventeen years old, thirty-

three years younger than her husband. She had never seen a man with his drawers off

before her wedding night. When, on that occasion, she observed his flaccid penis, she

asked with great interest: "What's that, Hus-band?" If she had said anything else, or if she

had said what she said in a slightly different tone of voice, the events of that night- and

this entire history-might have taken another course; in spite of the special drink Flagg had

given him an hour before, at the end of the wedding feast, Roland might simply have

slunk away. But he saw her then exactly as she was-a very young girl who knew even

less about the baby-making act than he did-and observed her mouth was kind, and began

to love her, as everyone in Delain would grow to love her.

"It is King's Iron," he said.

"It doesn't look like iron," said Sasha, doubtfully.

"It is before the forge," he said.

"Ali!" said she. "And where is the forge?"

"If you will trust me," said he, getting into bed with her, "I will show you, for you have

brought it from the Western Barony with you but did not know it."

The people of Delain loved her because she was kind and good. It was Queen Sasha who

created the Great Hospital, Queen Sasha who wept so over the cruelty of the bear baiting

in the Plaza that King Roland finally outlawed the practice, Queen Sasha who pleaded for

a Remission of King's Taxes in the year of the great drought, when even the leaves of the

Great Old Tree went gray. Did Flagg plot against her, you might ask? Not at first. These

were relatively small things in his view, because he was a real magician, and had lived

hundreds and hundreds of years.

He even allowed the Remission of Taxes to pass, because the year before, Delain's navy

had smashed the Anduan pirates, who had plagued the Kingdom's southern coast for over

a hundred years. The skull of the Anduan pirate-king grinned from a spike outside the

palace walls and Delain's treasury was rich with re-covered plunder. In larger matters,

matter of state, it was still Flagg's mouth which was closest to King Roland's ear, and so

Flagg was at first content.

Although Roland grew to love his wife, he never grew to love that activity which most

men consider sweet, the

act which produces both the lowliest cook's 'prentice and the heir to the highest throne.

He and Sasha slept in separate bed-rooms, and he did not visit her often. These visits

would happen no more than five or six times in a year, and on some of those occasions no

iron could be made at the forge, in spite of Flagg's ever more potent drinks and Sasha's

unfailing sweetness.

But, four years after the marriage, Peter was made in her bed. And on that one night,

Roland had no need of Flagg's drink, which was green and foaming and which always

made him feel a little strange in his head, as if he had gone crazy. He had been hunting

that day in the Preserves with twelve of his men. Hunt-ing was the thing that Roland had

always loved most of all -the smell of the forest, the crisp tang of the air, the sound of the

horn, and the feel of the bow as an arrow left on a true, hard course. Gunpowder was

known but rare in Delain, and to hunt game with an iron tube was considered low and

contemptible in any case.

Sasha was reading in bed when he came to her, his ruddy, bearded face alight, but she

laid her book on her bosom and listened raptly to his story as he told it, his hands moving.

Near the end, he drew back to show her how he had drawn back the bow and had let Foe-

Hammer, his father's great arrow, fly across the little glen. When he did this, she laughed

and clapped and won his heart.

The King's Preserves had almost been hunted out. In these modern days it was rare to

find so much as a good-sized deer in them, and no one had seen a dragon since time out

of mind. Most men would have laughed if you had suggested there might still be such a

mythy creature left in that tame forest. But an hour before sundown on that day, as

Roland and his party were about to turn back, that was just what they found . . . or what

found them.

The dragon came crashing and blundering out of the under-brush, its scales glowing a

greenish copper color, its soot-caked nostrils venting smoke. It had not been a small

dragon, either,

but a male just before its first molting. Most of the party were thunderstruck, unable to

draw an arrow or even to move.

It stared at the hunting party, its normally green eyes went yellow, and it fluttered its

wings. There was no danger that it could fly away from them-its wings would not be well

developed enough to support it in the air for at least another fifty years and two more

moltings-but the baby-webbing which holds the wings against a dragon's body until its

tenth or twelfth year had fallen away, and a single flutter stirred enough wind to topple

the head huntsman backward out of his saddle, his horn flying from his hand.

Roland was the only one not stunned to utter movelessness, and although he was too

modest to say so to Sasha, there was real heroism in his next few actions, as well as a

sportsman's zest for the kill. The dragon might well have roasted most of the surprised

party alive, if not for Roland's prompt action. He gigged his horse forward five steps, and

nocked his great arrow. He drew and fired. The arrow went straight to the mark-that one

gill-like soft spot under the dragon's throat, where it takes in air to create fire. The worm

fell dead with a final fiery gust, which set all the bushes around it alight. The squires put

this out quickly, some with water, some with beer, and not a few with piss and, now that I

think of it, most of the piss was really beer, because when Roland went a-hunting, he

took a great lot of beer with him, and he was not stingy with it, either.

The fire was out in five minutes, the dragon gutted in fifteen. You still could have boiled

a kettle over its steaming nostrils when its tripes were let out upon the ground. The

dripping nine-chambered heart was carried to Roland with great ceremony. He ate it raw,

as was the custom, and found it delicious. He only regretted the sad knowledge that he

would almost certainly never have another.

Perhaps it was the dragon's heart that made him so strong that night. Perhaps it was only

his joy in the hunt, and in knowing he had acted quickly and coolheadedly when all the

others were *dragon image page 7*

sitting stunned in their saddles (except, of course, for the head huntsman, who had been

lying stunned on his back). For whatever reason, when Sasha clapped her hands and

cried, "Well done, my brave Husband!," he fairly leaped into her bed. Sasha greeted him

with open eyes and a smile that reflected his own triumph. That night was the first and

only time Roland enjoyed his wife's embrace in sobriety. Nine months later-one month

for each chamber of the dragon's heart-Peter was born in that same bed, and the Kingdom

rejoiced-there was an heir to the throne.

You probably think-if you have bothered to think about it at all-that Roland must have

stopped taking Flagg's strange green drink after the birth of Peter. Not so. He still took it

occasionally. This was because he loved Sasha, and wanted to please her. In some places,

people assume that only men enjoy sex, and that a woman would be grateful to be left

alone. The people of Delain, however, held no such peculiar ideas-they assumed that a

woman took normal pleasure in that act which produced earth's most pleasurable

creatures. Roland knew he was not properly attentive to his wife in this matter, but he

resolved to be as attentive as he could, even if this meant taking Flagg's drink. Only

Flagg himself knew how rarely the King went to his Queen's bed.

Some four years after the birth of Peter, on New Year's Day, a great blizzard visited

Delain. It was the greatest, save one, in living memory-the other I'll tell you of later.

Heeding an impulse he could not explain even to himself, Flagg mixed the King a

draught of double strength-perhaps it was something in the wind that urged him to do it.

Ordinarily, Roland would have made a grimace at the awful taste and perhaps

put it aside, but the excitement of the storm had caused the annual New Year's Day party

to be especially gay, and Roland had become very drunk. The blazing fire on the hearth

reminded him of the dragon's final explosive breath, and he had toasted the head, which

was mounted on the wall, many times. So he drank the green potion off at a single gulp,

and an evil lust fell upon him. He left the dining hall at once and visited Sasha. In the

course of trying to love her, he hurt her.

"Please, Husband," she cried, sobbing.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled. "Huzzz . . ." He fell heavily asleep beside her and remained

insensible for the next twenty hours. She never forgot the strange smell that had been on

his breath that night. It had been a smell like rotten meat, a smell like death. Whatever,

she wondered, had he been eating . . . or drinking?

Roland never touched Flagg's drink again, but Flagg was well satisfied, nevertheless.

Nine months later, Sasha gave birth to Thomas, her second son. She died bringing him

forth. Such things happened, of course, and while everyone was saddened, no one was

really surprised. They believed they knew what had happened. But the only people in the

Kingdom who really knew the circumstances of Sasha's death were Anna Crookbrows,

the midwife, and Flagg, the King's magician. Flagg's patience with Sasha's meddling had

finally run out.

*.Peter was only five when his mother died, but he remembered her dearly. He thought

her sweet, tender, loving, full of mercy. But five is a young age, and most of his

memories were not very specific. There was one clear memory which he held in his

mind, however-it was of a reproach she had made to him. Much later, the memory of this

reproach became vital to him. It had to do with his napkin.

Every first of Five-month, a feast was held at court to celebrate the spring plantings. In

his fifth year, Peter was allowed to attend for the first time. Custom decreed that Roland

should sit at the head of the table, the heir to the throne at his right hand, the Queen at the

foot of the table. The practical result of this was that Peter would be out of her reach

during the meal, and so Sasha coached him carefully beforehand on how he should

behave. She wanted him to show up well, and to be mannerly. And, of course, she knew

that during the meal he would be on his own, because his father had no idea of manners

at all.

Some of you may wonder why the task of instructing Peter on his manners fell to Sasha.

Did the boy not have a governess? (Yes, as a matter of fact he had two.) Were there no

servants whose service was dedicated wholly to the little prince? (Battalions of them.)

The trick was not to get these people to take care of Peter but to keep them away. Sasha

wanted to raise him herself, at least as much as she could. She had very definite ideas

about how her son should be raised. She loved him dearly and wanted to be with him for

her own selfish reasons. But she also realized that she had a deep and solemn

responsibility in the matter of Peter's nurture. This little boy would be King someday, and

above all else, Sasha wanted him to be good. A good boy, she thought, would be a good

King.

Great banquets in the King's Hall were not very neat affairs, and most nannies wouldn't

have been very concerned about the little boy's table manners. Why, he is to be the King!

they would have said, a little shocked at the idea that they should correct him in such

piddling matters. Who cares if he spills the gravy boat? Who cares if he dribbles on his

ruff, or even wipes his hands on it? Did not King Alan in the old days sometimes vomit

into his plate and then command his court jester to come nigh and "drink this nice hot

soup"? Did not King John often bite the heads off live trout and then put the flopping

bodies into the bodices of the serving girls' dresses? Will not this banquet end up, as most

banquets do, with the participants' throwing food across the table at each other?

Undoubtedly it would, but by the time things degenerated to the food-throwing stage, she

and Peter would long since have retired. What concerned Sasha was that attitude of who

cares. She thought it was the worst idea anyone could ever plant in the head of a little boy

destined to be King.

So Sasha instructed Peter carefully, and she observed him carefully on the night of the

banquet. And later, as-he lay sleepy in his bed, she talked to him.

Because she was a good mother, she first complimented him lovingly on his behavior and

manners-and this was right, because for the most part they had been exemplary. But she

knew that no one would correct him where he went wrong unless she did it herself, and

she knew she must do it now, in these few years when he idolized her. So when she was

finished complimenting him, she said:

"You did one thing wrong, Pete, and I never want to see you do it again."

Peter lay in his bed, his dark blue eyes looking at her solemnly. "What was that,

Mother?"

"You didn't use your napkin," said she. "You left it folded by your plate, and it made me

sorry to see it. You ate the roast chicken with your fingers, and that was fine, because that

is how men do it. But when you put the chicken down again, you wiped your fingers on

your shirt, and that is not right."

"But Father . . . and Mr. Flagg . . . and the other nobles . . ."

"Bother Flagg, and bother all the nobles in Delain!" she cried with such force that Peter

cringed back in his bed a little. He was afraid and ashamed for having made those roses

bloom in her cheeks. "What your father does is right, for he is the King, and what you do

when you are King will always be right. But Flagg is not King, no matter how much he

would like to be, and the nobles are not Kings, and you are not King yet, but only a little

boy who forgot his manners."

She saw he was afraid, and smiled. She laid her hand on his brow.

"Be calm, Peter," she said. "It is a small thing, but still im-

portant-because you'll be King in your own time. Now run and fetch your slate."

"But it's bedtime-"

"Bother bedtime, too. Bedtime can wait. Bring your slate."

Peter ran for his slate.

Sasha took the chalk tied to the side and carefully printed three letters. "Can you read this

word, Peter?"

Peter nodded. There were only a few words that he could read, although he knew most of

the Great Letters. This happened to be one of the words. "It says con."

Yes that's right. Now write it backward and see what you fin d

`';:.. Backward a•: Peter said doubtfully.

"Yes, that's right. "

Peter did so, his letters staggering childishly across the slate below his mother's neat

printing. He was astounded to find another of the few words he could read.

DOG! Mamma! It says DOG!"

"Yes. It says dog." The sadness in her voice quenched Peter's excitement at once. His

mother pointed from GOD to DOG. "These are the two natures of man," she said. "Never

forget them, because someday you will be King and Kings grow to be great and tall-as

great and tall as dragons in their ninth moltings."

"Father isn't great and tall," objected Peter. Roland was, in fact, short and rather

bowlegged. Also, he carried a great belly in front of him from all the beer and mead he

had consumed.

Sasha smiled.

"He is, though. Kings grow invisibly, Peter, and it happens all at once, as soon as they

grasp the scepter and the crown is put on their heads in the Plaza of the Needle!"

"They do?" Peter's eyes grew large and round. He thought that the subject had wandered

far from his failure to use his napkin at the banquet, but he was not sorry to see such an

embarrassing topic lost in favor of this tremendously interesting

one. Besides, he had already resolved that he would never forget to use his napkin again-

if it was important to his mother, then it was important to him.

"Oh yes, they do. Kings grow most awfully big, and that's why they have to be specially

careful, for a very big person could crush smaller ones under his feet just taking a walk,

or turning around, or sitting down quickly in the wrong place. Bad Kings do such things

often. I think even good Kings cannot avoid doing them sometimes."

"I don't think I understand-"

"Then listen a moment longer." She tapped the slate again. "Our preachers say that our

natures are partly of God and partly of Old Man Splitfoot. Do you know who Old Man

Splitfoot Is, Peter?"

"He's the devil."

"Yes. But there are few devils outside of made-up stories, Pete-most bad people are more

like dogs than devils. Dogs are friendly but stupid, and that's the way most men and

women are when they are drunk. When dogs are excited and confused, they may bite;

when men are excited and confused, they may fight. Dogs are great pets because they are

loyal, but if a pet is all a man is, he is a bad man, I think. Dogs can be brave, but they

may also be cowards that will howl in the dark or run away from danger with their tails

between their legs. A dog is just as eager to lick the hand of a bad master as he is to lick

the hand of a good one, because dogs don't know the difference between good and bad. A

dog will eat slops, vomit up the part his stomach can't stand, and then go back for more."

She fell silent for a moment, perhaps thinking of what was going on in the banqueting

hall right now-men and women roaring with good-natured drunken laughter, flinging

food at each other, and sometimes turning aside to vomit casually on the floor beside

their chairs. Roland was much the same, and sometimes this made her sad, but she did

not hold it against him, nor did she tax him with it. It was his way. He might promise to

reform

in order to please her, and he might even do it, but he would not be the same man

afterward.

"Do you understand these things, Peter?"

Peter nodded.

"Fine! Now, tell me." She leaned toward him. "Does a dog use a napkin?"

Humbled and ashamed, Peter looked down at the counterpane and shook his head.

Apparently the conversation hadn't wandered as far as he had thought. Perhaps because

the evening had been very full and because he was now very tired, tears rose in his eyes

and spilled down his cheeks. He struggled against the sobs that wanted to come. He

locked them in his chest. Sasha saw this and admired it.

"Don't cry over an unused napkin, my love," said Sasha, "for that was not my intention."

She rose, her full and pregnant belly before her. The delivery of Thomas was now very

near. "Your behavior was otherwise exemplary. Any mother in the Kingdom would have

been proud of a young son who behaved himself half so well, and my heart is full with

admiration for you. I only tell you these things because I am the mother of a prince. That

is sometimes hard, but it cannot be changed, and i' truth, I would not change it if I could.

But remember that someday lives will depend on your every waking motion; lives may

even depend on dreams which come to you in sleep. Lives may not depend on whether or

not you use your napkin after the roast chicken . . . but they may. They may. Lives have

depended on less, at times. All I ask is that in everything you do, you try to remember the

civilized side of your nature. The good side-the God side. Will you promise to do that,

Peter?"

"I promise. "

"Then all is well." She kissed him lightly. "Luckily, I am young and you are young. We

will talk of these things more, when you have more understanding."

They never did, but Peter never forgot the lesson: he always used his napkin, even when

those around him did not.

So Sasha died.

She has little more part in this story, yet there is one further thing about her you should

know: she had a dollhouse. This dollhouse was very large and very fine, almost a castle

in miniature. When the time of her marriage came round, Sasha mustered as much cheer

as she could, but she was sad to be leaving everyone and everything at the great house in

the Western Barony where she had grown up-and she was a little bit nervous, too. She

told her mother, "I have never been married before and do not know if I shall like it."

But of all the childish things she left behind, the one she regretted most was the dollhouse

she had had ever since she was a little girl.

Roland, who was a kind man, somehow discovered this, and although he was also

nervous about his future life (after all, he had never been married before, either), he found

time to commission Quentin Ellender, the greatest craftsman in the land, to build his new

wife a new dollhouse. "I want it to be the finest dollhouse a young lady ever had," he told

Ellender. "I want her to look at it once and forget about her old dollhouse forever."

As you'll no doubt realize, if Roland really meant this, it was a foolish thing to say. No

one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is

replaced by one like it that is much nicer. Sasha never forgot her old dollhouse, but she

was quite impressed with the new one. Anyone who was not a total idiot would have

been. Those who saw it declared it was Quentin Ellender's best work, and it may have

been. It was a country house in miniature, very like the one Sasha had lived in with her

parents in rolling Western Barony. Everything in it was small, but so cunningly made you

would swear it must really work . . . and most things in it did!

The stove, for instance, really got hot and would even cook tiny portions of food. If you

put a piece of hard coal no bigger than a matchbox in it, it would burn all day . . . and if

you reached into the kitchen with your clumsy big-person's finger and happened to touch

the stove while the coal was burning, it would give you a burn for your pains. There were

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

StephenKingTheEyesoftheDragon1Once,inakingdomcalledDetain,therewasaKingwithtwosons.DetainwasaveryoldkingdomandithadhadhundredsofKings,perhapseventhousands;whentimegoesonlongenough,notevenhistorianscanremembereverything.RolandtheGoodwasneitherthebestnortheworstKingevertoruletheland.Hetriedveryhardnot...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen King - Eyes Of The Dragon (1987).pdf

共227页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - Eyes Of The Dragon (1987)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: