Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Sometimes I almost hear what you’re trying to tell me. And then it fades against all my knowledge and experience. I’m glad you stayed. If I die, I’ll leave you facing one maddened dragon. But still, I’m glad.”

  A black moon rose high over his shoulder and she jumped. Ryd rolled off the ledge into the mists. Peka hid her face from the peering black flare. Blue light smoldered through the mist, the moon rolled suddenly out of the sky, and she could breathe again.

  Streaks of dispersing gold lit the dawn sky like the sunrises she saw one month out of the year. Peka, in a cold daze on the ledge, saw Ryd for the first time in an hour. He was facing the dragon, his silver hand outstretched. In his palm lay a crystal so cold and deathly white that Peka, blinking at it, felt its icy stare into her heart.

  She shuddered. Her bones turned to ice; mist seemed to claw into her veins. She breathed bitter, frozen air as heavy as water. She reached for the wormspoor; her arm moved sluggishly, and her fingers unfolded with brittle movements. The dragon was breathing in short, harsh spurts. The silver hoods were over its eyes. Its unfolded wing lay across the ice like a limp sail. Its jaws were open, hissing faintly, but its head was reared back, away from Ryd’s hand. Its heartbeat, in the silence, was slow, slow.

  Peka dragged herself up, icicle by icicle. In the clear wintry dawn, she saw the beginning and the end of the enormous ring around Hoarsbreath. The dragon’s tail lifted wearily behind Ryd, then fell again, barely making a sound. Ryd stood still; his eyes, relentless, spring-blue, were his only color. As Peka watched, swaying on the edge, the world fragmented into simple things: the edges of silver on the dragon’s scales, Ryd’s silver fingers, his old-man’s hair, the pure white of the dragon’s hide. They faced one another, two powerful creatures born out of the same winter, harrowing one another. The dragon rippled along its bulk; its head reared farther back, giving Peka a dizzying glimpse of its open jaws. She saw the cracked tooth, crumbled like a jewel she might have battered inadvertently with her pick, and winced. Seeing her, it hissed, a tired, angry sigh.

  She stared down at it; her eyes seemed numb, incapable of sorrow. The wing on the ice was beginning to stir. Ryd’s head lifted. He looked bone-pale, his face expressionless with exhaustion. But the faint, icy smile of triumph in his eyes struck her as deeply as the stare from the death-eye in his palm.

  She drew in mist like the dragon, knowing that Ryd was not harrowing an old, tired ice-dragon, but one out of his memories who never seemed to yield. “You bone-brained dragon,” she shouted, “how can you give up Hoarsbreath so easily? And to a Dragon-Harrower whose winter is colder and more terrible than yours.” Her heart seemed trapped in the weary, sluggish pace of its heart. She knelt down, wondering if it could understand her words or only feel them. “Think of Hoarsbreath,” she pleaded, and searched for words to warm them both. “Fire. Gold. Night. Warm dreams, winter tales, silence—” Mist billowed at her and she coughed until tears froze on her cheeks. She heard Ryd call her name on a curious, inflexible note that panicked her. She uncorked the wormspoor with trembling fingers, took a great gulp, and coughed again as the blood shocked through her. “Don’t you have any fire at all in you? Any winter flame?” Then a vision of gold shook her: the gold within the dragon’s heart, the warm gold of wormspoor, the bitter gold of dragon’s blood. Ryd said her name again, his voice clear as breaking ice. She shut her eyes against him, her hands rising through a chill, dark dream. As he called the third time, she dropped the wormspoor down the dragon’s throat.

  The hoods over its eyes rose; they grew wide, white-rimmed. She heard a convulsive swallow. Its head snapped down; it made a sound between a bellow and a whimper. Then its jaws opened again and it raked the air with gold flame.

  Ryd, his hair and eyebrows scored suddenly with gold, dove into the snow. The dragon hissed at him again. The stream beyond him turned fiery, ran toward the sea. The great tail pounded furiously; dark cracks tore through the ice. The frozen cliffs began to sweat under the fire; pillars of ice sagged down, broke against the ground. The ledge Peka stood on crumbled at a wave of gold. She fell with it in a small avalanche of ice-rubble. The enormous white ring of dragon began to move, blurring endlessly past her eyes as the dragon gathered itself. A wing arched up toward the sky, then another. The dragon hissed at the mountain, then roared desperately, but only flame came out of its bowels, where once it had secreted winter. The chasms and walls of ice began breaking apart. Peka, struggling out of the snow, felt a lurch under her feet. A wind sucked at her hair, pulled at her heavy coat. Then it drove down at her, thundering, and she sat in the snow. The dragon, aloft, its wingspan the span of half the island, breathed fire at the ocean, and its husk of ice began to melt.

  Ryd pulled her out of the snow. The ground was breaking up under their feet. He said nothing; she thought he was scowling, though he looked strange with singed eyebrows. He pushed at her, flung her toward the sea. Fire sputtered around them. Ice slid under her; she slipped and clutched at the jagged rim of it. Brine splashed in her face. The ice whirled, as chunks of the mountain fell into the sea around them. The dragon was circling the mountain, melting huge peaks and cliffs. They struck the water hard, heaving the ice-floes farther from the island. The mountain itself began to break up, as ice tore away from it, leaving only a bare peak riddled with mine shafts.

  Peka began to cry. “Look what I’ve done. Look at it.” Ryd only grunted. She thought she could see figures high on the top of the peak, staring down at the vanishing island. The ocean, churning, spun the ice-floe toward the mainland. The river was flowing again, a blue-white streak spiraling down from the peak. The dragon was over the mainland now, billowing fire at the harbor, and ships without crews or cargo were floating free.

  “Wormspoor,” Ryd muttered. A wave ten feet high caught up with them, spilled, and shoved them into the middle of the channel. Peka saw the first of the boats taking the swift, swollen current down from the top of the island. Ryd spat out seawater, and took a firmer grip of the ice. “I lost every crystal, every dragon’s fire I possessed. They’re at the bottom of the sea. Thanks to you. Do you realize how much work, how many years—”

  “Look at the sky.” It spun above her, a pale, impossible mass of nothing. “How can I live under that? Where will I ever find dark, quiet places full of gold?”

  “I held that dragon. It was just about to leave quietly, without taking half of Hoarsbreath with it.”

  “How will we live on the island again? All its secrets are gone.”

  “For fourteen years I studied dragons, their lore, their flights, their fires, the patterns of their lives and their destructions. I had all the knowledge I thought possible for me to acquire. No one—”

  “Look at all that dreary flatland.”

  “No one,” he said, his voice rising, “ever told me you could harrow a dragon by pouring wormspoor down its throat!”

  “Well, no one told me, either!” She slumped beside him, too despondent for anger. She watched more boats carrying miners, young children, her mother, down to the mainland. Then the dragon caught her eye, pale against the winter sky, somehow fragile, beautifully crafted, flying into the wake of its own flame.

  It touched her mourning heart with the fire she had given it. Beside her, she felt Ryd grow quiet. His face, tired and battered, held a young, forgotten wonder, as he watched the dragon blaze across the world’s cap like a star, searching for its winter. He drew a soft, incredulous breath.

  “What did you put into that wormspoor?”

  “Everything.”

  He looked at her, then turned his face toward Hoarsbreath. The sight made him wince. “I don’t think we left even my father’s bones at peace,” he said hollowly, looking for a moment less a Dragon-Harrower than a harrowed miner’s son.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “No, you don’t,” he sighed. “You feel. The dragon’s heart. My heart. It’s not a lack of knowledge or experiences that destroyed Hoarsbreath, but something else
I lost sight of: you told me that. The dark necessity of wisdom.”

  She gazed at him, suddenly uneasy, for he was seeing her. “I’m not wise. Just lucky—or unlucky.”

  “Wisdom is a flatlander’s word for your kind of feeling. You put your heart into everything—wormspoor, dragons, gold—and they become a kind of magic.”

  “I do not. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Ryd Yarrow. I’m a miner; I’m going to find another mine—”

  “You have a gold mine in your heart. There are other things you can do with yourself. Not harrow dragons, but become a Watcher. You love the same things they love.”

  “Yes. Peace and quiet and private places—”

  “I could show you dragons in their beautiful, private places all over the world. You could speak their language.”

  “I can’t even speak my own. And I hate the flatland.” She gripped the ice, watching it come.

  “The world is only another tiny island, ringed with a great dragon of stars and night.”

  She shook her head, not daring to meet his eyes. “No. I’m not listening to you anymore. Look what happened the last time I listened to your tales.”

  “It’s always yourself you are listening to,” he said. The gray ocean swirled the ice under them, casting her back to the bewildering shores of the world. She was still trying to argue when the ice moored itself against the scorched pilings of the harbor.

  A Matter of Music

  Cresce Dami was the daughter of Yrida Dami, teacher for thirty-nine years at the great Bardic School at Onon. When she was three, Cresce began learning simple, ancient rhymes. When she was five, she was given eight different instruments and seven years to learn how to play them. By the time she was fifteen, she could sing the hundred and one Songs of Changing Fortune of the reclusive hill-people of Jazi. She could tune the strings of her cyrillaya to any of the nine changes passed through centuries from the first Bard of Onon. She knew to play the trihorne for the salute to anyone below the rank of a king; the flute for the funeral of a king’s child; the cyrillaya for fanfares of death and victory at the hunt for anyone attached to the king’s court at Hekar; the lovely, reedy cothone that looked like a cow’s bag with eight teats only when she was asked. Then she was told that the difficult part of her studies was just beginning. When she was twenty-one she was given a new set of instruments made by each of her teachers, and the information that the Lords of Daghian had requested a bard. And that night the heavy rafters of the dark, smoky tavern the students frequented rocked with laughter, songs, and glasses emptied and broken with high-pitched trihorne notes in her honor.

  “I am going to become a Bard of Daghian,” she said for the fortieth time. Ruld Egemi, who had been her friend since she was eight and her lover since she was nineteen, nodded and laughed. A trihorne note, a wail out of the long brass throats tuned to battle, shattered the glass in his hand, spilling spiced wine over them both. He laughed again, and she stared, swallowing, at the curve of his mouth and the conjunction of bones at his throat. “I’m going to leave you.”

  He looked too drunk and happy to realize it. “I’ll come to Daghian. Maybe in a year,” he said. “Maybe they’ll hire me to play the trihorne fanfares for death at private hunts, if nothing else.”

  “If you play the trihorne for that in Daghian,” someone said, pulling up a chair with a screech, “you’ll wind up in Jazi playing for corn-dances until you’re ninety. The Lords of Daghian claim equal rank with the king.”

  “You play the cyrillaya for no one but the king or his relatives, or anyone acting in his name, at a hunt,” Ruld said stubbornly. “Isn’t that right, Cresce?”

  “The Lords of Daghian are of the king’s bloodline; if you use the trihorne that would be a mortal insult. That’s right, isn’t it, Cresce?”

  “They’re of a bastard line—”

  “They are of an ancient, powerful line, and you sing one version of the Battle of Hekar Pass to them, and another to the king—”

  The tavern keeper mopped up the wine on the table and set steaming glasses down with a flourish. People even from beyond the city came to his small, ancient tavern to hear the students sing and play to one another as they drank. The rare nights of the rampant trihorne and shattered wineglasses were a ritual amply paid for. Cresce smiled at him without seeing him; she heard the argument without listening. She leaned back in Ruld’s shadow, her mind running over things she had packed. The case of resin, soft cloth, oils, and spare reeds Ruld had given her. Clothes. Blankets and skins, for Daghian was beyond the mountains, and she might not always find lodgings as she traveled. The set of tiny pipes her father had carved for her when she was a child. His cothone, which was the only instrument of his she had not burned when he died. The cothone, with its many haunting voices, was her instrument, tuned to the deepest voices within herself, as the trihorne in Ruld’s hands became his own voice. The love of the cothone she had inherited from her father, and his strong, skilled fingers. Her small bones, her straight black hair, her face with its wide-set eyes and wide cheekbones, she had inherited from her mother’s hill-blood, the streak of Jazi in her that made their songs throb in her blood as she sang them.

  “Cresce—”

  The argument was beginning to heat. Slapping her hand down on the table, she said, “Hear me!” Then she whispered, tuned to their silence, “Oh, hear. To the courts of the King at Hekar nine hundred years ago came the riches and glory of the kingdom. To the vanquished court at Daghian came the first Bard of Onon, possessing nothing but the cyrillaya. To him, not to the king, the Lords of Daghian gave honor. In his memory, the ritual music of the royal instrument, the cyrillaya, honors the Lords of Daghian.” She lifted her hand, closed it, gripping their attention. “And if you dare remind the Lords of Daghian with a trihorne that the king outranks them, they will tie you in a knot around it.”

  Ruld, hovering in her spell with his chair balanced on one leg, brought it upright with a crash. “Play,” he said. “Play the cothone.” His eyes were suddenly as she loved to see them, dark, intense with desire. Then she heard an echo of her own words in her head, and a chill shot through her, turning her hands icy.

  “I am going to Daghian. Bards have left Hekar itself to go to Daghian. Oh, Ruld, how do I dare? They’ll laugh at the cothone. I’m so small they won’t see me when I stand up to play. My reeds will squeak.”

  “The Lords of Daghian expect from Onon the best the school has to offer. The musicians chose you,” Ruld said. “Play the cothone.”

  She slid the strap from her shoulder and stood up. She put the pipe to her mouth, drew from the soft, tanned skin full of air deep, haunting phrases, the wordless voices half-heard at twilight, from dark forests, from the far side of still lakes. Then, leaving one soft, low note weaving through the air, she added voices to it from the fourth and seventh pipes, the pipes longing and of passion. She played her longing; the full, humming notes of the cothone called it out of her bones, out her heart’s marrow. There was not a sound or movement in the tavern. Faces were blurred beyond her, torch fire shivering over them. Their silence played to her song. Then, beside her, Ruld’s trihorne began to weave its pure, fiery voice into the voices of the cothone. The long horn slid in her slow rhythm through its changes. It was a stroke of pure gold under the smoky torchlight. Her throat swelled; she played simple, ancient Jazi music while the tears of sorrow and happiness burned down her face.

  She rode out of Onon the next morning before sunrise. It was midautumn; she wore a long, heavy coat split down the back for riding, and high boots lined with sheepskin. Her instruments were encased in furs and skins; they made odd, bulky shapes on her shadow as the sun rose. She sang to keep her voice warm. Her song broke in puffs of mist in front of her. The fear in her was gone. She was the daughter of Yrida Dami, who had played at Hekar five years for the king; and the teachers of Onon had chosen her above all the musicians to send to the proud, critical court at Daghian. She got out one of her tiny pipes as the
morning warmed and answered back to the birds flying around her.

  It took her twelve days to reach Daghian. She sang some nights at wayside inns, earning money for lodgings and supplies. She watched the weary faces of travelers ease as they listened to her. They were simple folk, who knew and loved the cothone, and she felt well paid by their silence. As she neared the mountains, even farmhouses became scarce. The pass through the mountains whistled with wild, empty autumn winds. She camped at night then, sitting close to her fire, singing ballads back at the winds in her deep, sweet voices. She saw the last leaves ripped from the trees as she rode. River water shimmered white with the wind’s white breath. The mountains at morning were ghostly with mist. But the loneliness of the pass did not reach her heart. She was Cresce Dami, going to Daghian, and even the winds knew it was bad luck to harm a bard.

  On the twelfth day, she reached the other side of the mountains and saw the flatlands veined with rivers, and the courts and cities built among them. Each river had a name; each was the name of a battle site, and each battle had spawned ballads of a dozen variations: one to be sung on a street corner, one at the market square under a mayor’s window, one at Hekar, one at Daghian… Before she was fourteen, Cresce had learned them all. She headed her horse down the hillside toward a main road.

  The court of the Lords of Daghian lay in wild country. Dark pine moaned of winter as she traveled down the winding road to Daghian. But she heard, shimmering across hard, empty fields, the timbreless, haunting notes of the cyrillaya, tuned to the victory of the hunt within the forests. Riders swept across the fields, their rich cloaks of deep green, blood-red, gold, and brown whirling behind them like leaves in the wind. They would feast, Cresce knew, on the kill, and she would be there, silent and anonymous, until the bones were picked, and servants brought washing bowls of scented water, and more wine. Then she would stand, interrupting their hunting stories, drawing their wine-flushed faces toward her, like the faces in the tavern, with a sweep of a hunting phrase across the cyrillaya.