Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Oh, go with him, lass,” her mother said tolerantly. “There may be no dragon, but we can’t have him swallowed up in the ice like his father. Besides, it may be a chance for spring.”

  “Spring is for flatlanders. There are things that shouldn’t be wakened. I know.”

  “How?” Ryd asked.

  She groped, wishing for the first time for a flatlanders skill with words. She said finally, “I feel it,” and he smiled. She sat back in her chair, irritated and vaguely frightened. “Oh, all right, Ryd Yarrow, since you’ll go with or without me. I’ll lead you down to the shores in the morning. Maybe by then you’ll listen to me.”

  “You can’t see beyond your snow-world,” he said implacably. “It is morning.”

  They followed one of the deepest mine shafts and clambered out of it to stand in the snow halfway down the mountain. The sky was lead gray; across the mists ringing the island’s shores, they could see the ocean, a swirl of white, motionless ice. The mainland harbor was locked. Peka wondered if the ships were stuck like birds in the ice. The world looked empty and somber.

  “At least in the dark mountain there is fire and gold. Here, there isn’t even a sun.” She took out a skin of wormspoor, sipped it to warm her bones. She held it out to Ryd, but he shook his head.

  “I need all my wits. So do you, or we’ll both end up preserved in ice at the bottom of a crevice.”

  “I know. I’ll keep you safe.” She corked the skin and added, “In case you were wondering.”

  But he looked at her, startled out of his remoteness. “I wasn’t. Do you feel that strongly?”

  “Yes.”

  “So did I, when I was your age. Now I feel very little.” He moved again. She stared after him, wondering how he kept her smoldering and on edge.

  She said abruptly, catching up with him, “Ryd Yarrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have two names. Ryd Yarrow and Dragon-Harrower. One is a plain name this mountain gave you. The other you got from the world, the name that gives you color. One name I can talk to, the other is the tale at the bottom of a bottle of worm-spoor. Maybe you could understand me if you hadn’t brought your past back to Hoarsbreath.”

  “I do understand you,” he said absently. “You want to sit in the dark all your life and drink wormspoor.”

  She drew breath and held it. “You talk but you don’t listen,” she said finally. “Just like all the other flatlanders.” He didn’t answer. They walked in silence a while, following the empty bed of an old river. The world looked dead, but she could tell by the air, which was not even freezing spangles of breath on her hood fur, that the winter was drawing to an end. “Suns-crossing must be only two months away,” she commented surprisedly.

  “Besides, I’m not a flatlander,” he said abruptly, surprising her again. “I do care about the miners, about Hoarsbreath. It’s because I care that I want to challenge that ice-dragon with all the skill I possess. Is it better to let you live surrounded by danger, in bitter cold, carving half-lives out of snow and stone, so that you can come fully alive for one month of the year?”

  “You could have asked us.”

  “I did ask you.”

  She sighed. “Where will it live, if you drive it away from Hoarsbreath?”

  He didn’t answer for a few paces. In the still day, he loosed no colors, though Peka thought she saw shadows of them around his pack. His head was bowed; his eyes were burning back at a memory. “It will find some strange, remote place where there is no gold, only rock; it can ring itself around emptiness and dream of its past. I came across an ice-dragon unexpectedly once, in a land of ice. The bones of its wings seemed almost translucent. I could have sworn it cast a white shadow.”

  “Did you want to kill it?”

  “No. I loved it.”

  “Then why do you—”

  But he turned at her suddenly, almost angrily, waking out of a dream. “I came here because you’ve built your lives on top of a terrible danger, and I asked for a guide, not a gadfly.”

  “You wanted me,” she said flatly. “And you don’t care about Hoarsbreath. All you want is that dragon. Your voice is full of it. What’s a gadfly?”

  “Go ask a cow. Or a horse. Or anything else that can’t live on this forsaken, frostbitten lump of ice.”

  “Why should you care, anyway? You’ve got the whole great world to roam in. Why do you care about one dragon wrapped around the tiny island on the top of nowhere?”

  “Because it’s beautiful and deadly and wrapped around my heartland. And I don’t know—I don’t know at the end of things which of us will be left on Hoarsbreath.” She stared at him. He met her eyes fully. “I’m very skilled. But that is one very powerful dragon.”

  She whirled, fanning snow. “I’m going back. Find your own way to your harrowing. I hope it swallows you.”

  His voice stopped her. “You’ll always wonder. You’ll sit in the dark, drinking wormspoor twelve months out of thirteen, wondering what happened to me. What an ice-dragon looks like, on a winter’s day, in full flight.”

  She hovered between two steps. Then, furiously, she followed him.

  They climbed deeper into mist, and then into darkness. They camped at night, ate dried meat and drank wormspoor beside a fire in the snow. The night sky was sullen and starless as the day. They woke to gray mists and traveled on. The cold breathed up around them; walls of ice, yellow as old ivory, loomed over them. They smelled the chill, sweaty smell of the sea. The dead riverbed came to an end over an impassable cliff. They shifted ground, followed a frozen stream downward. The ice walls broke up into great jewels of ice, blue, green, gold, massed about them like a giant’s treasure hoard. Peka stopped to stare at them.

  Ryd said with soft, bitter satisfaction, “Wormspoor.”

  She drew breath. “Wormspoor.” Her voice sounded small, absorbed by cold. “Ice jewels, fallen stars. Down here you could tell me anything and I might believe it. I feel very strange.” She uncorked the wormspoor and took a healthy swig. Ryd reached for it, but he only rinsed his mouth and spat. His face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, tired.

  “How far down do you think we are?”

  “Close. There’s no dragon. Just mist.” She shuddered suddenly at the soundlessness. “The air is dead. Like stone. We should reach the ocean soon.”

  “We’ll reach the dragon first.”

  They descended hillocks of frozen jewels. The stream they followed fanned into a wide, skeletal filigree of ice and rock. The mist poured around them, so painfully cold it burned their lungs. Peka pushed fur over her mouth, breathed through it. The mist of wormspoor she had drunk was forming shadows around her, flickerings of faces and enormous wings. Her heart felt heavy; her feet dragged like boulders when she lifted them. Ryd was coughing mist; he moved doggedly, as if into a hard wind. The stream fanned again, going very wide before it met the sea. They stumbled down into a bone-searing flow of mist. Ryd disappeared; Peka found him again, bumping into him, for he had stopped. The threads of mist untangled above them, and she saw a strange black sun, hooded with a silvery web. As she blinked at it, puzzled, the web rolled up. The dark sun gazed back at her. She became aware then of her own heartbeat, of a rhythm in the mists, of a faint, echoing pulse all around her: the icy heartbeat of Hoarsbreath.

  She drew a hiccup of a breath, stunned. There was a mountain cave ahead of them, from which the mists breathed and eddied. Icicles dropped like bars between its grainy white surfaces. Within it rose stones or teeth as milky white as quartz. A wall of white stretched beyond the mists, vast, earthworm round, solid as stone. She couldn’t tell, in the blur and welter of mist, where winter ended and the dragon began.

  She made a sound. The vast, silvery eyelid drooped like a parchment unrolled, then lifted again. From the depths of the cave came a faint rumbling, a vague, drowsy waking question: Who?

  She heard Ryd’s breath finally. “Look at the scar under its eye,” he said softly. She saw a jagged track beneath the b
lack sun. “I can name the Harrower who put that there three hundred years ago. And the broken eyetooth. It razed a marble fortress with its wings and jaws; I know the word that shattered that tooth, then. Look at its wing scales. Rimed with silver. It’s old. Old as the world.” He turned, finally, to look at her. His white hair, slick with mists, made him seem old as winter. “You can go back now. You won’t be safe here.”

  “I won’t be safe up there, either,” she whispered. “Let’s both go back. Listen to its heart.”

  “Its blood is gold. Only one Harrower ever saw that and lived.”

  “Please.” She tugged at him, at his pack. Colors shivered into the air: sulfur, malachite, opal. The deep rumble came again; a shadow quickened in the dragon’s eye. Ryd moved quickly, caught her hands. “Let it sleep. It belongs here on Hoarsbreath. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you see? It’s a thing made of gold, snow, darkness—” But he wasn’t seeing her; his eyes, remote and alien as the black sun, were full of memories and calculations. Behind him, a single curved claw lay like a crescent moon half-buried in the snow.

  Peka stepped back from the Harrower, envisioning a bloody moon through his heart, and the dragon roused to fury, coiling upward around Hoarsbreath, crushing the life out of it. “Ryd Yarrow,” she whispered. “Ryd Yarrow. Please.” But he did not hear his name.

  He began to speak, startling echoes against the solid ice around them. “Dragon of Hoarsbreath, whose wings are of hoarfrost, whose blood is gold—” The backbone of the hoar-dragon rippled slightly, shaking away snow. “I have followed your path of destruction from your beginnings in a land without time and without seasons. You have slept one night too long on this island. Hoarsbreath is not your dragon’s dream; it belongs to the living, and I, trained and titled Dragon-Harrower, challenge you for its freedom.” More snow shook away from the dragon, baring a rippling of scale and the glistening of its nostrils. The rhythm of its mist was changing. “I know you,” Ryd continued, his voice growing husky, strained against the silence. “You were the white death of the fishing island Klonos, of ten Harrowers in Ynyme, of the winter palace of the ancient lord of Zuirsh. I have harried nine ice-dragons—perhaps your children—out of the known world. I have been searching for you for many years, and I came back to the place where I was born to find you here. I stand before you armed with knowledge, experience, and the dark wisdom of necessity. Leave Hoarsbreath, go back to your birthplace forever, or I will harry you down to the frozen shadow of the world.”

  The dragon gazed at him motionlessly, an immeasurable ring of ice looped about him. The mist out of its mouth was for a moment suspended. Then its jaws crashed together, spitting splinters of ice. It shuddered, wrenched itself loose from the ice. Its white head reared high, higher, ice booming and cracking around it. Twin black suns stared down at Ryd from the gray mist of the sky. Before it roared, Peka moved.

  She found herself on a ledge above Ryd’s head without remembering how she got there. Ryd vanished in a flood of mist. The mist turned fiery; Ryd loomed out of it like a red shadow, dispersing it. Seven crescents lifted out of the snow, slashed down at him, scarring the air. A strange voice shouted Ryd’s name. He flung back his head and cried a word. Somehow the claw missed him, wedged deep into the ice.

  Peka sat back. She was clutching the skin of wormspoor against her heart; she could feel her heartbeat shaking it. Her throat felt raw; the strange voice had been hers. She uncorked the skin, took a deep swallow, and another. Fire licked down her veins. A cloud of ice billowed at Ryd. He said something else, and suddenly he was ten feet away from it, watching a rock where he had stood freeze and snap into pieces.

  Peka crouched closer to the wall of ice behind her. From her high point she could see the briny, frozen snarl of the sea. It flickered green, then an eerie orange. Bands of color pinioned the dragon briefly like a rainbow, arching across its wings. A scale caught fire; a small bone the size of Ryd’s forearm snapped. Then the cold wind of the dragon’s breath froze and shattered the rainbow. A claw slapped at Ryd; he moved a fraction of a moment too slowly. The tip of a talon caught his pack. It burst open with an explosion of glittering colors. The dragon hooded its eyes; Peka hid hers under her hands. She heard Ryd cry out in pain. Then he was beside her instead of in several pieces, prying the wormspoor out of her hands.

  He uncorked it, his hands shaking. One of them was seared silver.

  “What are they?” she breathed. He poured wormspoor on his burned hand, then thrust it into the snow. The colors were beginning to die down.

  “Flame,” he panted. “Dragon-flame. I wasn’t prepared to handle it.”

  “You carry it in your pack?”

  “Caught in crystals, in fire-leaves. It will be more difficult than I anticipated.”

  Peka felt language she had never used before clamor in her throat. “It’s all right,” she said dourly. “I’ll wait.”

  For a moment, as he looked at her, there was a memory of fear in his eyes. “You can walk across the ice to the mainland from here.”

  “You can walk to the mainland,” she retorted. “This is my home. I have to live with or without that dragon. Right now there’s no living with it. You woke it out of its sleep. You burnt its wing. You broke its bone. You told it there are people on its island. You are going to destroy Hoarsbreath.”

  “No. This will be my greatest harrowing.” He left her suddenly and appeared flaming like a torch on the dragon’s skull, just between its eyes. His hair and his hands spattered silver. Word after word came out of him, smoldering, flashing, melting in the air. The dragon’s voice thundered; its skin rippled and shook. Its claw ripped at ice, dug chasms out of it. The air clapped nearby, as if its invisible tail had lifted and slapped at the ground. Then it heaved its head, flung Ryd at the wall of mountain. Peka shut her eyes. But he fell lightly, caught up a crystal as he rose, and sent a shaft of piercing light at the upraised scales of its underside, burrowing toward its heart.

  Peka got unsteadily to her feet, her throat closing with a sudden whimper. But the dragon’s tail, flickering out of the mist behind Ryd, slapped him into a snowdrift twenty feet away. It gave a cold, terrible hiss; mist bubbled over everything; so that for a few minutes Peka could see nothing beyond the lip of the ledge. She drank to stop her shivering. Finally, a green fire blazed within the white swirl. She sat down again slowly, waited.

  Night rolled in from the sea. But Ryd’s fires shot in raw, dazzling streaks across the darkness, illuminating the hoary, scarred bulk of dragon in front of him. Once, he shouted endless poetry at the dragon, lulling it until its mist-breath was faint and slow from its maw. It nearly put Peka to sleep, but Ryd’s imperceptible steps closer and closer to the dragon kept her watching. The tale was evidently an old one to the dragon; it didn’t wait for an ending. Its head lunged and snapped unexpectedly, but a moment too soon. Ryd leaped for shelter in the dark, while the dragon’s teeth ground painfully on nothingness. Later, Ryd sang to it, a whining, eerie song that showered icicles around Peka’s head. One of the dragon’s teeth cracked, and it made an odd, high-pitched noise. A vast webbed wing shifted free to fly, unfolding endlessly over the sea. But the dragon stayed, sending mist at Ryd to set him coughing. A foul, ashy-gray miasma followed blurring over them. Peka hid her face in her arms. Sounds like the heaving of boulders and the spattering of fire came from beneath her. She heard the dragon’s dry roar, like ones dragged against one another. There was a smack, a musical shower of breaking icicles, and a sharp, anguished curse. Ryd appeared out of the turmoil of light and air, sprawled on the ledge beside Peka.

  His face was cut, with ice, she supposed, and there was blood in his white hair. He looked at her with vague amazement.

  “You’re still here.”

  “Where else would I be? Are you winning or losing?”

  He scooped up snow, held it against his face. “I feel as if I’ve been fighting for a thousand years… Sometimes, I think I tangle in its memories, as it thinks of other Harr
owers, old dragon-battles, distant places. It doesn’t remember what I am, only that I will not let it sleep… Did you see its wingspan? I fought a red dragon once with such a span. Its wings turned to flame in the sunlight. You’ll see this one in flight by dawn.”

  She stared at him numbly, huddled against herself. “Are you so sure?”

  “It’s old and slow. And it can’t bear the gold fire.” He paused, then dropped the snow in his hand with a sigh and leaned his face against the ice-wall. “I’m tired, too. I have one empty crystal, to capture the essence of its mist, its heart’s breath. After that’s done, the battle will be short.” He lifted his head at her silence, as if he could hear her thoughts. “What?”

  “You’ll go on to other dragons. But all I’ve ever had is this one.”

  “You never knew—”

  “It doesn’t matter that I never knew it. I know now. It was coiled all around us in the winter, while we lived in warm darkness and firelight. It kept out the world. Is that such a terrible thing? Is there so much wisdom in the flatlands that we can’t live without?”

  He was silent again, frowning a little, either in pain or faint confusion. “It’s a dangerous thing, a destroyer.”

  “So is winter. So is the mountain, sometimes. But they’re so beautiful. You are full of so much knowledge and experience that you forgot how to see simple things. Ryd Yarrow, miner’s son. You must have loved Hoarsbreath once.”

  “I was a child, then.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry I brought you down here. I wish I were up there with the miners, in the last peaceful night.”

  “There will be peace again,” he said, but she shook her head wearily.

  “I don’t feel it.” She expected him to smile, but his frown deepened. He touched her face suddenly with his burned hand.