Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “H’m,” said the voice with interest, and the princess unbound them one by one from her hair. They slid gently through the air, striped Thorn’s hand with gold. “H’m,” said the little voice. “Bend closer.”

  Thorn straightened after a few moments. He blinked; drops of cold sweat rolled into his beard. The princess said uneasily, “What?”

  “Um.”

  “Well, what?”

  He shuffled his big feet among the leaves. The horse’s head turned very slowly; one eye regarded him evilly. Thorn stared back at it, transfixed. He forgot, suddenly, what he was going to say. He scratched his head. Was it about something to eat? The princess urged the horse forward impatiently.

  “Oh, Troll.”

  Deeper they went into the forest. They crossed a stream as cold and feathery white as moonlight. Ivory-pale frogs croaked on its banks, their staring eyes of various colors full of some strange pleading. Thorn shied away from them. Magic. He had no desire to eat them. A grove of trees with leaves made of pearls and diamonds made the princess stop and stare. Thorn growled deep in his throat and stretched out both hands. Trees trembled; leaves flashed down like tears.

  “No,” the princess said, as Thorn bent toward them. “No.” Her face was pale; he saw the glint of a jewel on her cheek. When she wasn’t looking at him, Thorn slipped a pearly leaf into his pocket.

  They crossed the grove of weeping trees. Beyond it roared a wild blue river. They stopped on its mossy bank. On the other side of the water rose a great glassy black cliff. Their eyes lifted higher, higher… On top of the cliff, so high the birds could scarcely reach it, stood a rose garden.

  The princess’s eyes fell from it to the rose in her hand. She looked again at the garden, again at the rose. The troll heard her breathing quicken. He was musing… Something? Fish in the river…twelve gold ribbons…the black horse, standing so quietly, still as the black cliff. Yellow ribbons, yellow eyes…

  “Ah.” He remembered what he had been wanting to say. “That’s it. You might want to get off that horse.”

  The princess’s face turned as white as the rose she had been. Thorn stopped sidling away from the horse, transfixed again by love. He heaved a sigh. The princess screamed. The black horse laughed, and with a mighty thrust of its haunches, soared into the sparkling, blue-white air, leaping upward toward the roses. Thorn, dangling from the horse’s tail, which in an exuberance of love he had clutched, shut his eyes and howled.

  He thumped like a bad apple among the rose trees. The horse was no longer a horse, but a sorcerer with terrible yellow eyes. The prince was a prince again. Every time he moved toward the sorcerer, a bramble would snake out of the earth and catch his wrist or his boot. The princess was becoming a whole rose tree. The prince, still struggling, was becoming a bramble man, thorny with anger, with blood-red blooms here and there on his body. The sorcerer was staring into his eyes. Thorn decided it was a good time to go fishing.

  He began to sneak away behind the sorcerer’s back. But diamonds were showering out of the crystal white rose tree. Scent wafted from it of distant, snowy peaks. Lovely, perfect roses, made for touching, beckoned to him, and he thought of the shiny braids the princess owed him, and the kiss. He hummed silently and waffled. Thorns were sliding through the prince’s yellow hair. The sorcerer was enthralled by his spell. Thorn thought again of the kiss.

  He thrust his hairy, warty face in front of sorcerer’s nose and bellowed, “Troll toll!”

  The sorcerer jumped. The spell tangled in his mind. Brambles reached toward him, tangled within his powerful confusion. The prince drew a hand loose, a foot. His sword slashed at the thorns, then at the troll, who was about to pluck a blossom from his lady-love.

  “Just one!”

  The prince snarled. His sword flashed toward the sorcerer, who was two yellow eyes in a mass of brambles. The flash kindled a fire in the sky, which shouted the instant before it disappeared. The roses, the ensorcelled sorcerer, the cliff, the forest, vanished in a well of darkness. Thorn heard a slow drip of water in the night. He smelled limestone. Then he could see again.

  “Where are we?” the princess said. She had a white rose petal in her hair, and rose leaves on her skirt. The prince had lost his sword, and his clothes looked as though birds had been pecking at them. “It’s so quiet. Are you here? I can’t see…”

  They were sitting on damp limestone inside a mountain. Thorn crept toward them. The princess started, and her hand went to her cheek.

  “Did you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind… Troll. Lead us out, and I will give you everything else I promised.”

  The troll smiled.

  He led them back to his bridge. It was dusk. The quiet river smelled like a good thick stew of frogs, toads, little bulbous-eyed fish. The prince and the princess, entwined, were murmuring peacefully together.

  “Is he dead? What became of your true horse? He cast so many spells. Are all the roses and diamond trees and frogs back in their proper shapes?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “Where was his land?”

  “Inside the mountain…”

  “No, the mountain was inside the land.”

  “Could you see me when you were a rose?”

  The troll sighed. Their voices wove together, made a private tapestry of events that no one else could see in just their way. “Ah, well,” he said, and thumped down underneath his bridge. The iron box was safe; bats circled his head; the river-voice welcomed him home.

  The princess called, surprised, “Troll, you may have my hair now.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “My ring?”

  “Keep it.”

  The princess was silent. Thorn heard her step from stone to stone. She came to him beneath the shadow of the bridge. She leaned over him as he sat glumly. When she left him, he was smiling.

  Their footsteps died away. He reached into his pocket for the leaf of pearls he had stolen, to put into his chest. But he only found a thread of fiery hair.

  Baba Yaga and the Sorcerer’s Son

  Long ago, in a vast and faraway country, there lived a witch named Baba Yaga. She was sometimes very wise and sometimes very wicked, and she was so ugly mules fainted at the sight of her. Most of the time she dwelled in her little house in the deep woods. Occasionally, she dipped down Underearth as easily as if the earth were the sea and the sea were air: down to the World Beneath the Wood.

  One morning when she was vacationing Underground, she had an argument with her house, which was turning itself around and around on its chicken legs and wouldn’t stop. Baba Yaga, who had stepped outside to find a plump morsel of something for breakfast, couldn’t get back in her door. She had given her house chicken legs to cause wonder and consternation in passersby. Nobody was around now but Baba Yaga, her temper simmering like a soup pot, and yet there it was, turning and swaying on its great bony legs in the greeny, underwater light of Underearth, looking for all the world like a demented chicken watching a beetle run circles around it.

  “Stop that!” Baba Yaga shouted furiously. “Stop that at once!” Then she made her voice sweet and said the words that you are supposed to say if you come across her house unexpectedly in the forest, and are brave or foolish or desperate enough to want in: “Little house, turn your back to the trees and open your door to me.” But the house, bewildered perhaps by being surrounded by trees, continued turning and turning. Baba Yaga scolded it until her voice was hoarse and flapped her apron at it as if it really were a chicken. “You stupid house!” she raged, for she still hadn’t had her breakfast, or even her morning tea. And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the roof of the world opened up at that moment and hurled something big and dark down at her that missed her by inches.

  She was so startled the warts nearly jumped off her nose. She peered down at it, blinking, fumbling in her apron for her spectacles.

  A young man lay at her feet. He had black hair and black e
yelashes; he was dressed in a dark robe with little bits of mirrors and Stardust and cat hairs all over it. He looked dead, but, as she stared, a little color came back into his waxen face. His eyes fluttered open.

  He gave a good yell, for Baba Yaga at her best caused strong windows to crack and fall out of their frames. Baba Yaga lifted her foot and kicked at a huge chicken foot that threatened to step on him, and he yelled again. By then he had air back in his lungs. He rolled and crouched, staring at the witch and trembling.

  Then he took a good look at the house. “Oh,” he sighed, “it’s you, Baba Yaga.” He felt himself: neck bone, shinbone. “Am I still alive?”

  “Not for long,” Baba Yaga said grimly. “You nearly squashed me flat.”

  He was silent then, huddled in his robe, eyeing her warily. Baba Yaga, mothers said to their children in the world above, will eat you if you don’t eat your supper. He, unimpressed with the warning, had always fed his peas to the dog anyway. And now look. Here she was as promised, payment for thousands of uneaten peas. Baba Yaga’s green, prismed glasses glittered at him like a fly’s eyes. He bowed his head.

  “Oh, well,” he said. “If you don’t kill me, my father will. I just blew up his house.”

  Baba Yaga’s spectacles slid to the end of her nose. She said grumpily, “Was it spinning?”

  “No. It was just sitting there, being a house, with all its cups in the cupboard, and the potatoes growing eyes in the bin, and dust making fuzz balls under the bed, just doing what houses do—”

  “Ha!”

  “And I was just…experimenting a little, with some magic in the cauldron. Baba Yaga, I swear I did exactly what the Book said to do, except we ran out of Dragon root, so I tossed in some Mandragora root instead—I thought It’d be a good substitute—but…” His black eyes widened at the memory. “All of a sudden bricks and boards and I went flying, and here I…here I… Where am I, anyway?”

  “Underground.”

  “Really?” he whispered without sound. “I blew myself that far. Why,” he added a breath later, distracted, “is your house doing that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, isn’t—doesn’t that make it difficult for you to get in the door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, why are you letting it—When you talk through your teeth like that, does that mean you’re angry?”

  Baba Yaga shrieked like a hundred boiling teakettles. The young man’s head disappeared. The house continued to spin.

  The witch caught her breath. She felt a little better, and there was the matter of the Sorcerer’s son’s missing head to contemplate. She waited. A wind full of pale colors and light voices sighed through the trees. She smelled roses from somewhere, maybe from a dream somebody was having about the Underwood. The head emerged slowly, like a turtle’s head, from the neck of the dark robe. The young man looked pale again, uneasy, but his eyes held a familiar, desperate glint.

  “Baba Yaga. You must help me. I’ll help you.”

  She snorted. “Do what? Blow my house up?”

  “No. Please. You’re terrible and capricious, but you know things. You can help me. Down here, rules blur into each other. A dream is real; a word spoken here makes a shape in the world above. If you could just make things go backward, just for a few moments, back to the moment before I reached for the Mandragora root—before I destroyed my father’s house—if it could just be whole again—”

  “Bosh,” Baba Yaga said rudely. “You would blow it up all over again.”

  “Would I?”

  “Besides, what do you think I am? I can’t even get my house to stop spinning, and you want me to unspin the world.”

  He sighed. “Then what am I to do? Baba Yaga, I love my father, and I’m very sorry I blew up his house. Isn’t there anything I can do? I just—Everything is gone. All his sorcery books, all his lovely precious jars and bottles, potions and elixirs, his dragon tooth, his giant’s thumbnail, his narwhal tusk—even his five-hundred-year-old cauldron blew into bits. Not to mention the cups, the beds, his favorite chair, and his cats—if I landed down here, they probably flew clear to China. Baba Yaga, he loves me, I know, but if I were him I might turn me into a toad or something for a couple of months—Maybe I should just run away to sea. Please?”

  Baba Yaga felt momentarily dizzy, as if all his babbling were sailing around her head. She said crossly, “What could you possibly do? I don’t want my woodstove and my tea towels blown to China.”

  “I promise, I promise…” The young man got to his feet, stood blinking at the house twirling precariously on its hen legs among the silent, blue-black trees. It was an amazing sight, one he could tell his children and his grandchildren about if he managed to stay alive that long. When I was a young man, I fell off the world, down, down to the Underneath, where I met the great witch Baba Yaga. She needed help and only I could help her…

  “Little house,” he called. “Little house, turn your back to the trees and open your door to me.”

  The house turned its feet forward, nestled down like a hen over an egg, opened its door, and stopped moving.

  Baba Yaga opened her mouth and closed it, opened her mouth and closed it, looking, for a moment, like the ugliest fish in the world. “How did you—how did you—”

  The young man shrugged. “It always works in the stories.”

  Baba Yaga closed her mouth. She shoved her glasses back up her nose and gave the young man, and then the house, an icy, glittering-green glare. She marched into her house without a word and slammed the door.

  “Baba Yaga!” the young man cried. “Please!”

  A terrible noise rumbled through the trees then. It was thunder; it was an earthquake; it was a voice so loud it made the grass flatten itself and turn silvery, as under a wind. The young man, his robe puffed and tugged every direction, was blown like a leaf against the side of the house.

  “Johann!” the voice said. “Johann!”

  The young man squeaked.

  The wind died. Baba Yaga’s head sprang out of her door like a cuckoo in a clock. “NOW WHAT?”

  The young man, trembling again, his face white as tallow gave a whistle of awe. “My father.”

  Baba Yaga squinted Upward from behind her prisms. She gave a sharp, decisive sniff, took her spectacles off. Then she took her apron off. She disappeared inside once more. When she came out again, she was riding her mortar and pestle.

  The young man goggled. Baba Yaga’s house slowly turning on its chicken legs among the trees was an astonishing sight indeed. But Baba Yaga whisking through the air in the bowl she used to grind garlic, rapping its side briskly with the pestle as if it were a horse, made the young sorcerer so giddy he couldn’t even tell if the mortar had grown huge, or if Baba Yaga had suddenly gotten very small.

  “Come!” she shouted, thrusting a broom handle over the side. He caught it; she pulled him up, dumped him on the bottom of the bowl, and yelled to the mortar, “Geeee-ha!”

  Off they went.

  It was a wondrous ride. The mortar was so fast it left streaks in the air, which the young man swept away, like clouds, with the broom. Each time he swept he saw a different marvel, far below, like another piece of the rich tapestry of the Underwood. He saw twelve white swans light on a stone in the middle of a darkening sea and turn into princes. He saw an old man standing on a cliff, talking to a huge flounder with a crown on its head. He saw two children, lost in a wood, staring hungrily at the sweet gingerbread house of another witch. He saw a princess in a high tower unbraid her hair and shake it loose so that it tumbled down and down the wall like a river of gold to the bottom, where her true love caught it in his hands. He saw a great, silent palace surrounded by brambles thick as a man’s wrist, sharp as daggers, and he saw the King’s son who rode slowly toward them. He saw rose gardens and deep, dark forests with red dragons lurking in them. He saw hummingbirds made of crystal among trees with leaves of silver and pearls. He saw secret, solitary towers rising out of
the middle of lovely lakes, or from the tops of mountain crags. He whispered, enchanted, as every sweep of the broom filled his eyes with wonders, “There is more magic here than in all my father’s books… I could stay here… Maybe I’ll stay here… I will stay…” He saw a small pond with a fish in it, as gold as the sun, that spoke once every hundred years. It rose up to the surface as he passed. Its eyes were blue fire; its mouth was full of delicate bubbles like a precious hoard of words. It broke the surface, leaped into the light. It said—

  “Johann!”

  The mortar bucked in the air like a boat on a wave. The young man sat down abruptly. Baba Yaga said irritably to the sky, “Stop shouting, he’s coming…”

  “Baba Yaga,” the young sorcerer whispered. “Baba Yaga.” Still sprawled at the bottom of the mortar, he gripped the hem of her skirt. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Home.”

  “I stopped—” he whispered, for his voice was gone. “I stopped your house. I helped you.”

  “Indeed,” the witch said. “Indeed you did. But I am Baba Yaga, and no one ever knows from one moment to the next what I will do.”

  She said nothing more. The young man slumped over himself, not even seeing the Firebird below, with her red beak and diamond eyes, stealing golden apples from the garden of the King. He sighed. Then he sighed again. Then he said, with a magnificent effort, “Oh, well. I suppose I can stand to leave all this behind and be a toad for a few months. It’s as much as I deserve. Besides, if I ran away, he’d miss me.” He stood up then and held out his arms to the misty, pastel sky of the world within the World. “Father! It’s me! I’m coming back. I’m coming…”

  Baba Yaga turned very quickly. She rapped the young sorcerer smartly on the head with her pestle. His eyes closed. She caught him in her arms as he swayed, and she picked him up and tossed him over the side of the mortar. But instead of falling down, he fell up, up into the gentle, opalescent sky, up until Up was Down below the feet of those who dwelled in the world Above.