Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He sat down on one of the window ledges, letting the cothone rest on his knee. The thick glass behind his head warped the cloudy landscape into a formless mist. When he did not continue, Cresce asked softly, “Is she dead?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Like you, she is half-Jazi.” He was silent again, frowning down at the cothone. He said abruptly, harshly, to the cothone, “She was so beautiful. Her eyes were true Jazi gray, gray as marsh mist at dusk. Her hair was so black it blinded me sometimes. We had known each other always. But one day she left me and didn’t come back. She took only a horse I had raised for her. She left me our son and her cothone.”

  “It’s—” Cresce had to stop to clear her throat. “It’s older than anyone living. That cothone.”

  “I know. It belonged to her great-grandmother. She had been taken forcibly from Jazi by a Lord of Daghian, as the army of Daghian marched through the hills to attack Hekar from the north.”

  She drew breath suddenly. “Hekar Pass.”

  “You sing one version in Daghian, and another to the king. The army of Daghian was massacred in the hills by the king’s army. Only nine men and one hill-woman survived to come back to Daghian. Men of Jazi betrayed Daghian’s position to the king. With some justice.” He touched the rings of gold on the cothone. “I think we had stolen their Bard. That was seventy years ago. Since then, no man of Daghian has been permitted in Jazi.”

  “So you couldn’t look for your wife.”

  “No. The last man of Daghian who went to Jazi was found at our gates wrapped in corn husks. There wasn’t a mark on him, but he was dead. I think the hills called her until she went back to them.”

  Cresce sat down beside him on the window ledge. She said softly, “Bards of Onon are permitted in Jazi, even during their most private rituals. I could take a message to her.”

  He looked at her. Then he dropped his arm around her shoulders. “Thank you.” She realized suddenly how rarely he smiled. “But I think that, like the woman my grandfather followed through the marshes, she doesn’t want to be found.”

  A few days later, men from Hekar on the king’s business came to speak to the Lords of Daghian. Cresce sang for them, playing at Sere’s request both the cyrillaya and the cothone. Later one of the men spoke privately to her, suggesting that Hekar would be a more suitable place for her great gift, since the king would never ask her to play a herdsman’s instrument at his court. She told that to Sere, and he laughed. But he was annoyed. When the Lords took the visitors from Hekar hunting in the waning days of autumn, Cresce rode with them to sound the fanfares of death. But Sere, with a ghost of malice in his eyes, had insisted she bring only her cothone. Breaugh and Hulme had grown so used to hearing the cothone that they scarcely noticed. But the visitors, after she played the fanfare for a stag’s death, were insulted. They said little, for they were in the middle of the Daghian marshes and could not have left the hunt without getting lost. But Cresce wished she had disregarded Sere and brought the cyrillaya instead. Its silvery voice would have broken through shreds of mists hanging over the marshes. The cothone seemed to gather mist, to bring it closer around them until the riders that she followed seemed shadowy, and Sere’s cloak, striped gold and red, was the one clear point in the world.

  She sounded fanfares for a deer, a brace of hare, a wild boar that charged unexpectedly out at them from some trees. The mists deepened in the early afternoon, until she had no idea which direction Daghian lay. She heard Breaugh suggest calmly that in another hour they should start back. The visitors agreed quickly. Someone sighted another deer; there was a short chase, and then Cresce heard Sere ahead of her, calling for a fanfare. She raised the cothone; the deep pipe of mourning sent the announcement of its death across the marshes.

  Then the mists closed about her completely. Softly, from the other side of the mists, a cothone began to play.

  How long she listened, she never knew. Its voices were deep, melding layer upon layer of fanfares across the marshes. Sitting breathless, motionless on her horse, she heard fanfares for the deaths of men and animals mingling with phrases from the winter rituals of Jazi. Slowly the salutes to death came to an end. Only the seventh pipe, with a rich, husky timbre she had never heard before, still sang through the mists. It troubled her, stirring things in her she felt she should have remembered but could not. She did not remember lifting her own cothone. But suddenly she was playing it in answer to the wild, unfamiliar music, while she guided her horse deeper into the marshes trying to find the other side of the mists.

  Something swirled out of the mist; a shadow pulled at her reins. She realized for the first time that she had been moving. She let her cothone fall. At the same time the strange music stopped. She heard only the lonely cry of a marsh bird and the faint trickle of water. She shuddered suddenly. Then she recognized the rider beside her.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Sere, whose face was expressionless, colorless in the mist, said only, “Sometimes the marshes pull you deeper into them when you’re trying to get out. Sound the battle-call of Daghian, so that Breaugh and Hulme know I’ve found you. We’ll have to smell our way home through this mist.”

  Not long afterward, on the first day of winter, the long silence between Daghian and Jazi was broken. One of the porters at the main gates interrupted the Lords as they sat after supper listening to their ancient steward giving his seasonal account of their household, lands, and finances. Hulme was stifling a yawn when the porter murmured to him, and dropped something that looked vaguely like a bird’s nest onto the table. Cresce, playing the muted cyrillaya, strained a little to see what the odd jumble was. Her thumb slipped off a string, struck a sour note, and Sere looked at her. She colored hotly. Then she saw the expression in his eyes.

  “Please,” he said. “Come here.”

  “Someone nailed this clutter with an arrow to the gate?” Hulme said incredulously. He fingered a dried corn husk. It rustled secretly under his touch. Then he eyed Sere. “What’s the matter with you?” he said roughly. Some of the blood came back into Sere’s face at his tone. The steward tossed his pen down with a sigh.

  Breaugh said, “Lets see the arrow.” The porter gave it to him. He touched its tip, then looked at Sere, and then at Hulme. “Bone. It’s a hill-arrow. Look at the holes in its tip.”

  “It whistled,” the porter said.

  “It’s a matter of peace and war,” Breaugh said shortly, and turned back to the account book. But his brows were drawn. “Have we offended Jazi lately?”

  “How would I know?” Hulme demanded. “We offend Jazi by breathing.” He shoved his chair back suddenly, stood up. He added to the porter, “All right. Let us know if you get shot.” He stood behind Sere, laid his hands on his brothers shoulders. “Corn husks. That’s all I understand of it. Remember the man they left at our doorstep bound from hair to heel in corn husks.” He touched a flat, thin tongue of wood. “What is that?”

  “A reed.” Sere’s eyes had not moved from Cresce’s face as she gazed down at the odd bundle of items. “A cothone reed. The arrow sings. Hulme, it’s a matter of music. A reed like that fits into one of the mouthpieces of the cothone. Which pipe?”

  Cresce picked it up. Her voice slid suddenly deep, husky. “The fourth. The pipe of longing.”

  There was silence. Sere’s face was expressionless. Breaugh picked up a strip of leather studded with tiny jewels. “It looks like a piece of bridle. And nine dead leaves… But what—”

  Sere moved abruptly. He stood up, went to one of the windows to stare out at the night. When no one spoke, he said to Cresce, “Is the singing arrow a part of their rituals?”

  She nodded a little jerkily. “In winter and spring.” She picked up the hollow arrow, blew into the shaft. The pitch was deep. “In winter, for the rituals of Changing Fortune, they pitch them low, to sing with the pipe of mourning.”

  “Winter.” he turned. Thoughts were breaking into his eyes. “The ritual. When is it?”

 
; “The ninth day of winter.”

  “And the leaves?”

  No one moved. He stepped back to the table. Hulme, breathing something, caught his arm as he reached for them.

  “Think,” he said flatly. “If you go into Jazi, it is no longer a matter of music. If they kill you, it’s a matter of war. If Daghian goes to war against Jazi, the king will be at our throats faster than a mad bog-wolf.”

  “Take the issue to Hekar,” Sere said shortly. “Demand justice from the king.”

  The blood flared into Hulme’s face; he looked for a moment as if Sere had struck him. “If I find you wrapped in corn husks on our doorstep, I’m supposed to crawl to Hekar to beg for justice? For that?”

  “Hulme—”

  “What kind of justice did Hekar show Daghian at Hekar Pass?”

  “That was seventy years ago.”

  “Jazi went to Hekar for justice then—an entire army slaughtered over one woman. That’s the worthless bone of justice Hekar would toss to us. If she wants to see you, why can’t she come here? Tell me that. You send her a message: a leaf of black hellebore for every year she’s been away, wrapped in bark from the scarred birch trees in Hekar Pass. In nine centuries Daghian hasn’t begged so much as a rat-dropping from Hekar. And you expect us to go begging for justice as if—as if we were subject—”

  Sere turned. His fists rose and slammed down on the table, spilling ink across the account book. “Will you be reasonable! I’m not even dead, yet!”

  The three men glared at one another, while the steward stared in horror at the mess. Then Breaugh growled, “Oh, sit down.” He righted the inkstand. “Oak leaves.” He looked at Sere. “There is no oak in Daghian until you reach the far side of the marshes. The border hills are covered with it.”

  “Breaugh—” Hulme said.

  “If he wants to go looking for his wife among ten thousand oak trees, it’s his business. If he gets killed, then it’s our business. Until then, it’s not a matter of war or estate or music—it’s a private affair.” He reached across the table suddenly, stirred the corn husks with one finger. “What’s that?”

  “Birch bark,” said the steward wearily. Sere unrolled the dry fragment of yellowish bark gently. He gazed down at it a moment, then looked at Cresce. “I can’t read music.”

  “Read it,” Breaugh grunted. “You don’t read it, you listen to it.”

  “At Onon, they wrote changeless ritual music—salutes, hunting fanfares, wedding and funeral music—so that we could memorize it quickly.” She studied the square notes pricked into the bark with red dye. Then the notes came together in her mind and she started.

  Sere said, “What is it?”

  “The trihorne salute to the Bard of Daghian.” There was another silence. Then Sere crumpled the bark in one hand, and Cresce said, astonished, “It’s an invitation.”

  “An invitation to what?” Hulme asked sourly. She looked at him without seeing him, envisioning a land beyond ten thousand oak, the land whose heart-voice was the cothone.

  “To their winter ritual. The Bard of Daghian is welcome…” She turned to Sere, her brows slanting upward perplexedly. “And you, also?”

  “Invited,” he said. He touched one of the minute blue jewels on the bridle, his face harsh with conflicting memories. “Not necessarily welcome.” She watched him a moment, uneasy, glimpsing his emotions like a complex instrument she had not been trained to play.

  Breaugh said softly, “It is a matter of music.”

  The cothone sang to her deeply, distantly, out of the mists. “May I go?” she asked, drawing Sere abruptly back from his past. She saw herself then as he saw her: small and dark-haired, a Jazi woman in spite of her background and rigorous training, who might vanish forever among the hills she had never seen.

  “No.” Then he touched her shoulder, his voice gentler. “No. Not when the invitation is pinned to the gate with an arrow. Not this time.” And, oddly, she was relieved at his reply.

  But he went, quietly and alone, at dawn. He returned twelve days later, with one of the watch parties Hulme had sent after him. He looked weary and bad-tempered; his replies to questions his brothers asked were brief. But, alone with Cresce after supper, he showed her a second bundle of corn husks.

  “I found it pinned to an oak on the other side of the mountain.”

  She drew out the arrow and opened the message carefully. Three reeds dropped out, a ring of white horsehair, a gold ring, and some dried oak leaves. “You didn’t see her?”

  “She wasn’t there.” He added, as she fingered the reeds, “The horse I gave her was white.”

  “But why—”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I do. The invitation was for you. I didn’t bring you.” She stared at him, bewildered, and he added, “Will you come with me?”

  “But, Lord, I don’t understand. Why does she want me.”

  “She.” He drew breath, closing his eyes. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I only know someone is reaching out of Jazi, luring me with memories, you with music.”

  “I am Bard of Daghian,” Cresce said a little stiffly. She blew into the arrow. Its pitch was high, light. “Spring. Seven oak leaves. The seventh day of spring.” Something caught at her throat. “Lord, at one point in the spring rituals, the cothone is played from sunrise to sunrise. At that time, all visiting Bards are permitted to play.”

  He held up the ring. “Look. It took me an entire morning to recognize that.”

  She took it, circled it with her thumb and finger. “It’s from a cothone…a very old one, like the cothone your wife left you…”

  “I think they want you to bring that cothone.”

  She closed her fingers over the ring, uneasy again at the tale being spun out of the darkness, within the unknown land, herself being moved skillfully within the tale.

  Sere said, “Look at the reeds.”

  She picked them up. “The fourth again. The pipe of longing. The eighth…”

  “The pipe of mourning. That one I recognized.” She turned the third reed in her hand. When she did not speak, he looked at her. “What is it?”

  “The sixth. The pipe of warning.”

  On the first day of spring, they left Daghian together. At Breaugh’s suggestion, Sere wore plain, rough-woven clothes, cloak and boots of sheepskin, as if he were some herdsman the bard of Daghian had hired to guide her across the marshes. Hulme suggested only that if Sere found himself dead and buried in corn husks, he should not bother coming home; the men of Daghian would come to Jazi to get him. The frozen marshes were still furrowed with ice. But the wild, violent spring winds, humming every voice of the cothone, had swept the sky clear, and the hills bordering Jazi looked very close. They crossed the marshes in five days. Cresce listened for the strange cothone, but the only sound she heard was the discordant babble of marsh birds returning after winter. She wondered: Did I dream it? and knew she had not. Sere was lost in his own dreams. He had spoken very little as they traveled together. At evenings, she pitched her music to ease into the mist of his memories, draw him back into the quiet night, the dark, rich smell of the marshes, the tiny circle of light that enclosed them. Sometimes she would lead him so far out of his mists that he would lift his head to meet her eyes across the fire. Then he would smile, acknowledging her skill, and she would wish they were back in Daghian, where life was complex and exact, and the language of the heart was not spoken in corn husks.

  On the afternoon of the fifth day, they rode out of the thinning marsh trees into the ancient, rolling hills of Jazi.

  They were covered, as far as Cresce could see, with bare, tangled oak. Nothing, human or animal, seemed to live among the trees. The voice of the wind had changed as they came out of the marshes. It piped with a spare, hollow timbre through the empty curves and shadows of the hills. Cresce wondered what instruments the musicians of Jazi, hearing that wind, had fashioned to match its voice.

  “There,” said Sere. He was pointing to one gnarled tree. “That
’s where I found the last message.”

  The trunk was bare. Cresce glanced vaguely at the endless forests. “My mother lived among these hills,” she said surprisedly, as if she had just realized it. “Lord, we have two days to find the place where they hold their rituals.”

  “I know.” But neither of them moved. The oak shadows strained down the faces of the hills, flung back by the westering sun. The air smelled of emptiness.

  “Well, what should we do?”

  He shook his head a little. Then he said, “You’re a bard. They’re expecting you. Let them know you’re here.”

  She thought a moment. Then she lifted her cothone and blew on the first pipe, the pipe of joy, the opening phrases of the first Song of Fortune for the spring ritual.

  There was a silence. The lovely fragment of song faded away. Sere turned to her, half-smiling, the tenseness wearing away from his face. Before he could speak, the empty oaks themselves sang an answer: every voice of the cothone echoing and overlapping one another in the salute to the Bard of Daghian.

  Men on beautiful, long-legged hill horses rode out of the trees. Sere caught at Cresce’s reins, but they came too fast. They surrounded Cresce and Sere, their horses weaving in and out of one another in a complex circle. The men carried hawks with fierce golden eyes on their shoulders; around their wrists small pipes dangled from leather thongs. The men were wiry and dark, with wide, high cheekbones and eyes that had taken their color from the winter mists. Only one of them, half a head taller than the others, had hair bright as copper, and eyes as golden as the hawks’. It was he who reached out finally, without speaking, caught Sere by the neck of his cloak, and wrenched him from his horse to the ground.