The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson

collecting the denuded bones in careful silence and sneaking away before daybreak tickled Jim's sense of humor.
    He walked down to the edge of the lake and drank, lapping like some enormous cat and flipping several pints of water into his throat with each flick of his long tongue. Satisfied at last, he looked westward toward the misty line of the ocean and spread his wings—
    "Ouch!" he said.
    Hastily he folded the wings again, cursing himself mentally. He should, of course, have expected this from the way Smrgol had run out of breath while flying yesterday. The first attempt to stretch Gorbash's wings had sent what felt like several keen-edged knives stabbing into muscles he had seldom used before. Like anyone else who has suddenly overexercised a body out of shape for such activity, he was stiff as a board in that portion of his body he had most need of at the moment.
    The irony of it did not escape him. For twenty-six years he had gotten along quite nicely without wings. Now, after one day's use of them, he was decidedly miffed to have to proceed on foot. His amusement gone, he turned his head toward the ocean and set about following a land route.
    Unfortunately, it could not be a direct route. Instinctively, he tried to travel on land as much as possible, but often he had to jump small ditches—which caused his wings to spread instinctively and sent fresh stabs of pain into his stiff flying muscles—and once or twice he had to actually swim a ditch or small lake too wide to jump. This taught him why dragons preferred to walk or fly. Unlike humans, they apparently had a slightly higher specific gravity than water. In other words, unless he swam furiously, he had a tendency to sink. And his dragon-body, Jim found, had a near-hysterical fear of getting any water up its nose.
    However, proceeding by these methods, he finally gained a rather wide tongue of land which he assumed to be the Great Causeway that Secoh had spoken about. He had seen nothing else to compare with it in the fens and, if further proof were needed, it seemed to run westward as far as he could see, as straight as a Roman road. It could almost, in fact, have been built there: it was several feet higher than most of the surrounding bits of land, covered with bushes and even an occasional tree.
    Jim rolled on the grass—he had just finished swimming one of the stretches of water too wide to jump—and flopped, belly-down, in the sun. A tree nearby kept the sun out of his eyes, the heat of the daystar's rays were soothing to his stiff muscles and the grass was soft. He had walked and swum away most of the morning and the midday hush was relaxing. He felt comfortable. Dropping his head on his foreclaws, he dozed a bit…
    He was awakened by the sound of someone singing. Lifting his head, he looked about. Someone was coming out along the causeway. Jim could now hear the dry clopping of a horse's hooves on the firm earth, the jingle of metal, the creak of leather, and over all this a fine, baritone voice caroling cheerfully to itself. Whatever the earlier verses of the song had been, Jim had no idea. But the chorus he heard now came clearly to his ear.
"… A right good spear,
a constant mind—
A trusty sword and true!
The dragons of the mere shall find
What Neville-Smythe can do!"
    The tune was one of the sort that Jim may have heard somewhere before. He was still trying to decide if he really knew it or not, when there was a crackling of branches. A screen of bushes some twenty feet away parted to disgorge a man in full plate armor, with his visor up and a single strip of scarlet pennon afloat just below the head of his upright lance; he was seated on a large, somewhat clumsy-looking white horse.
    Jim, interested, sat up for a better look.
    It was, as things turned out, not the best possible move. Immediately, the man on horseback saw him and the visor came down with a clang, the long lance seemed to leap into one steel-gauntleted