The Man From The South

[lochinvar]

“Da! Da!”

The boy skidded as he barreled through the door of the pub, barely catching himself from a braining against the doorpost. Oblivious to how close he had come to ending in woe, he pelted up to the burly man at the counter and slid to a stop, chest heaving from a mixture of exertion and excitement.

“Da! Da!” he repeated unnecessarily. “Someone’s coming!”
“So?” inquired the man in the slightly bemused, slightly indulgent tone usually reserved for dealing with the addled. “Lots of people come and go, all the time. What’s special about this one?”

“He’s coming from the South,” squeaked the boy, eyes shining, “and he’s wearing dragon skin!”

This announcement was greeted by a chorus of laughter from the half-dozen men in the common room.

“’Dragon skin’, is it, boy?” put in a balding gaffer at the end of the table nearest the door. “An’ just how would you know that, eh?”
“I saw it!” the boy answered, beginning to suspect that he wasn’t going to be taken seriously—again. “It’s just like in the stories! It bends like leather, but it’s shiny like metal! I saw it!” he insisted, rounding back to his father for support.

“Okay, Talad, I’m sure you saw something. Tell you what; why don’t you go keep an eye on this dragon-fellow for me? I’ll have a speak with him when he gets here, and I’ll need to have as much information as I can to make a wise decision. Mind you keep well hid,” he admonished with a shaking finger. “We wouldn’t want to tip our hand before we know which way the wind lies, would we? There’s a good lad. Now, off with you.”

With a grateful glance the boy pivoted and with the energy reserves of a ten-year-old caromed off a bench on his way pell-mell back out into the lane. Before they could blink he was gone, leaving an air of bemused head-scratching behind.

“Coming from South, eh?” a man in his 40’s at one end of the room broke the silence. “Haven’t seen anyone from the South since…well, I can’t remember. Anyone?” He looked around the room at thoughtful, unanswering faces. “That’s unusual, anyway, isn’t it, Shaw?”

“Yes. Unusual,” agreed the boy’s father, gazing pensively into his half-finished pint. “Not much south of here but sand and scrub. No one’s come from that direction since the Wars, seems to me.”

“Maybe that means things are looking up down that way,” ventured a youngish man with an unfortunate nose at the other end of the counter. “They say there used to be towns an’ such down that way in the old times, before the troubles. Maybe they’ve resettled.”

“Yeah…maybe.” A low mumble of half-hearted assent greeted this opinion, followed by another silence.

“Dragon skin!” snorted the gaffer suddenly into the quiet. “You’ve been letting that boy shirk his chores and hang around Old Mother Sarhan, I’ll wager. Won’t do him no good, fillin’ his head with stories of knights and dragons and such-like! Mark my words, Shaw, he’ll come to a sorry end if he keeps on.”
“Yes, Dafid, you’ve mentioned that to me before,” opined Shaw dryly. “More than once.”

This elicited a somewhat more enthusiastic round of chuckles in the group. Dafid’s dire predictions of doom and woe for any and all members of younger generations were legendary, and the mere fact that few, if any, such consequences had ever materialized never seemed to faze or dissuade him.

Occasionally Shaw would engage him by mildly reminding him of this or that prophecy of sorrow and disaster which had not happened, then leaning back and listening to Dafid’s convoluted explanation of the extraordinary coincidences which had somehow cheated fate and narrowly averted a harrowing end.

This was what the room anticipated, but to their disappointment Shaw didn’t pursue it. “From the south, eh?” he murmured quietly again, then took a long pull at his tankard.