Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

They chose to sleep, as they always did, tired by the long journey, dazed by too much rich, vague color in the shadows. She sat on the steps and watched them for a little. One cried in his sleep. She went to the top of the tower after a while, where she could watch the stars. Under the moon, the flowers turned odd, secret colors, as if their true colors blossomed in another land’s daylight, and they had left their pale shadows behind by night. She fell asleep naming the moon’s colors.

  In the morning, she went down to see who had had sense enough to leave.

  They were all still there, searching, picking, discarding among the treasures on the floor, scattered along the spiraling stairs. Shafts of light from the narrow windows sparked fiery colors that constantly caught their eyes, made them drop what they had, reach out again. Seeing her, the one from Dulcis Isle said, trembling, his eyes stuffed with riches, “May we ask questions? What is this?”

  “Don’t ask her, Marlebane,” the one from Stoney Head said brusquely. “She’ll lie. They all do.”

  She stared at him. “I will only lie to you,” she promised. She took the small treasure from the hand of the man from Dulcis Isle. “This is an acorn made of gold. If you swallow it, you will speak all the languages of humans and animals.”

  “And this?” one of Grenelief said eagerly, pushing next to her, holding something of silver and smoke.

  “That is a bracelet made of a dragon’s nostril bone. The jewel in it is its petrified eye. It watches for danger when you wear it.”

  The man of Carnelaine was playing a flute made from a wizard’s thighbone. His eyes, the odd gray-green of the dragon’s eye, looked dream-drugged with the music. The man of Stoney Head shook him roughly.

  “Is that your choice, Ran?”

  “No.” He lowered the flute, smiling. “No, Corbeil.”

  “Then drop it before it seizes hold of you and you choose it. Have you seen yet what you might take?”

  “No. Have you changed your mind?”

  “No.” He looked at the fountain, but, prudent, did not speak.

  “Bram, look at this,” said one brother of Grenelief to another. “Look!”

  “I am looking, Yew.”

  “Look at it! Look at it, Ustor! Have you ever seen such a thing? Feel it! And watch: It vanishes, in light.”

  He held a sword; its hilt was solid emerald, its blade like water falling in clear light over stone. The Lady left them, went back up the stairs, her bare feet sending gold coins and jewels spinning down through the crosshatched shafts of light. She stared at the place on the horizon where the flat dusty gold of the plain met the parched dusty sky. Go, she thought dully. Leave all this and go back to the places where things grow. Go, she willed them, go, go, go, with the beat of her heart’s blood. But no one came out the door beneath her. Someone, instead, came up the stairs.

  “I have a question,” said Ran of Carnelaine.

  “Ask.”

  “What is your name?”

  She had all but forgotten; it came to her again, after a beat of surprise. “Amaranth.” He was holding a black rose in one hand, a silver lily in the other. If he chose one, the thorns would kill him; the other, flashing its pure light, would sear through his eyes into his brain.

  “Amaranth. Another flower.”

  “So it is,” she said indifferently. He laid the magic flowers on the parapet, picked a dying geranium leaf, smelled the miniature rose. “It has no smell,” she said. He picked another dead leaf. He seemed always on the verge of smiling. It made him look sometimes wise and sometimes foolish. He drank out of the bronze watering helm; it was the color of his hair.

  “This water is too cool and sweet to come out of such a barren plain,” he commented. He seated himself on the wall, watching her. “Corbeil says you are not real. You look real enough to me.” She was silent, picking dead clover out of the clover pot. “Tell me where you came from.”

  She shrugged. “A tavern.”

  “And how did you come here?”

  She gazed at him. “How did you come here, Ran of Carnelaine?”

  He did smile then, wryly. “Carnelaine is poor; I came to replenish its coffers.”

  “There must be less chancy ways.”

  “Maybe I wanted to see the most precious thing there is to be found. Will the plain bloom again, if it is found? Will you have a garden instead of skull-pots?”

  “Maybe,” she said levelly. “Or maybe I will disappear. Die when the magic dies. If you choose wisely, you’ll have answers to your questions.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe I will not choose. There are too many precious things.”

  She glanced at him. He was trifling, wanting hints from her, answers couched in riddles. Shall I take rose or lily? Or wizard’s thighbone? Tell me. Sword or water or dragons eye? Some had questioned her so before.

  She said simply, “I cannot tell you what to take. I do not know myself. As far as I have seen, everything kills.” It was as close as she could come, as plain as she could make it: Leave.

  But he said only, his smile gone, “Is that why you never left?” She stared at him again. “Walked out the door, crossed the plain on some dead king’s horse and left?”

  She said, “I cannot.” She moved away from him, tending some wildflowers she called wind-bells, for she imagined their music as the night air tumbled down from the mountains to race across the plain. After a while, she heard his steps again, going down.

  A voice summoned her: “Lady of the Skulls!” It was the man of Stoney Head. She went down, blinking in the thick, dusty light. He stood stiffly, his face hard. They all stood still, watching.

  “I will leave now,” he said. “I may take anything?”

  “Anything,” she said, making her heart stone against him, a ghost’s heart, so that she would not pity him. He went to the fountain, took a mouthful of water. He looked at her, and she moved to show him the hidden lines of the dragon’s mouth. He vanished through the stones.

  They heard him scream a moment later. The three of Grenelief stared toward the sound. They each wore pieces of a suit of armor that made the wearer invisible: one lacked an arm, another a thigh, the other his hands. Subtly their expressions changed, from shock and terror into something more complex. Five, she saw them thinking. Only five ways to divide it now.

  “Anyone else?” she asked coldly. The man of Dulcis Isle slumped down onto the stairs, swallowing. He stared at her, his face gold-green in the light. He swallowed again. Then he shouted at her.

  She had heard every name they could think of to shout before she had ever come to the tower. She walked up the stairs past him; he did not have the courage to touch her. She went to stand among her plants. Corbeil of Stoney Head lay where he had fallen, a little brown patch of wet earth beside his open mouth. As she looked, the sun dried it, and the first of the carrion birds landed.

  She threw bones at the bird, cursing, though it looked unlikely that anyone would be left to take his body back. She hit the bird a couple of times, then another came. Then someone took the bone out of her hand, drew her back from the wall.

  “He’s dead,” Ran said simply. “It doesn’t matter to him whether you throw bones at the birds or at him.”

  “I have to watch,” she said shortly. She added, her eyes on the jagged line the parapet made against the sky, like blunt, worn dragon’s teeth, “You keep coming, and dying. Why do you all keep coming? Is treasure worth being breakfast for the carrion crows?”

  “Its worth many different things. To the brothers of Grenelief it means adventure, challenge, adulation if they succeed. To Corbeil it was something to be won, something he could have that no one else could get. He would have sat on top of the pile and let men look up to him, hating and envying.”

  “He was a cold man. Cold men feed on a cold fire. Still,” she added, sighing, “I would have preferred to see him leave on his feet. What does the treasure mean to you?”

  “Money.” He smiled his vague smile. “It’s not in me to lose my life over money.
I’d sooner walk empty-handed out the door. But there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “The riddle itself. That draws us all, at heart. What is the most precious thing? To see it, to hold it, above all to recognize it and choose it—that’s what keeps us coming and traps you here.” She stared at him, saw, in his eyes, the wonder that he felt might be worth his life.

  She turned away; her back to him, she watered bleeding heart and columbine, stonily ignoring what the crows were doing below. “If you find the thing itself,” she asked dryly, “what will you have left to wonder about?”

  “There’s always life.”

  “Not if you are killed by wonder.”

  He laughed softly, an unexpected sound, she thought, in that place. “Wouldn’t you ride across the plain if you heard tales of this tower, to try to find the most precious thing in it?”

  “Nothing’s precious to me,” she said, heaving a cauldron of dandelions into shadow. “Not down there, anyway. If I took one thing away with me, it would not be sword or gold or dragon bone. It would be whatever is alive.”

  He touched the tiny rose. “You mean, like this? Corbeil would never have died for this.”

  “He died for a mouthful of water.”

  “He thought it was a mouthful of jewels.” He sat beside the rose, his back to the air, watching her pull pots into shadow against the noon light. “Which makes him twice a fool, I suppose. Three times a fool: for being wrong, for being deluded, and for dying. What a terrible place this is. It strips you of all delusions, and then it strips your bones.”

  “It is terrible,” she said somberly. “Yet those who leave without choosing never seem to get the story straight. They must always talk of the treasure they didn’t take, not of the bones they didn’t leave.”

  “It’s true. Always, they take wonder with them out of this tower and they pass it on to every passing fool.” He was silent a little, still watching her. “Amaranth,” he said slowly. “That’s the flower in poetry that never dies. It’s apt.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there is another kind of Amaranth, that’s fiery and beautiful and it dies…” Her hands stilled, her eyes widened, but she did not speak. He leaned against the hot, crumbling stones, his dragon’s eyes following her like a sunflower following the sun. “What were you,” he asked, “when you were the Amaranth that could die?”

  “I was one of those faceless women who brought you wine in a tavern. Those you shout at, and jest about, and maybe give a coin to and maybe not, depending how we smile.”

  He was silent, so silent she thought he had gone, but when she turned, he was still there; only his smile had gone. “Then I’ve seen you,” he said softly, “many times, in many places. But never in a place like this.”

  “The man from Stoney Head expected someone else, too.”

  “He expected a dream.”

  “He saw what he expected: Lady of the Skulls.” She pulled wild mint into a shady spot under some worn tapestry. “And so he found her. That’s all I am now. You were better off when all I served was wine.”

  “You didn’t build this tower.”

  “How do you know? Maybe I got tired of the laughter and the coins and I made a place for myself where I could offer coins and give nothing.”

  “Who built this tower?”

  She was silent, crumbling a mint leaf between her fingers. “I did,” she said at last. “The Amaranth who never dies.”

  “Did you?” He was oddly pale; his eyes glittered in the light as it at the shadow of danger. “You grow roses out of thin air in this blistered plain; you try to beat back death for us with our own bones. You curse our stupidity and our fate, not us. Who built this tower for you?” She turned her face away, mute. He said softly, “The other Amaranth, the one that dies, is also called Love-lies-bleeding.”

  “It was the last man,” she said abruptly, her voice husky, shaken with sudden pain, “who offered me a coin for love. I was so tired of being touched and then forgotten, of hearing my name spoken and then not, as if I were only real when I was looked at and just something to forget after that, like you never remember the flowers you toss away. So I said to him: No, and no, and no. And then I saw his eyes. They were amber with thorns of dark in them: sorcerer’s eyes. He said, ‘Tell me your name.’ And I said, ‘Amaranth,’ and he laughed and laughed and I could only stand there, with the wine I had brought him overturned on my tray, spilling down my skirt. He said, ‘Then you shall make a tower of your name, for the tower is already built in your heart.’”

  “Love-lies-bleeding,” he whispered.

  “He recognized that Amaranth.”

  “Of course he did. It was what died in his own heart.”

  She turned then, wordless, to look at him. He was smiling again, though his face was still blanched under the hard, pounding light, and the sweat shone in his hair. She said, “How do you know him?”

  “Because I have seen this tower before and I have seen in it the woman we all expected, the only woman some men ever know… And every time we come expecting her, the woman who lures us with what’s most precious to us and kills us with it, we build the tower around her again and again and again…”

  She gazed at him. A tear slid down her cheek and then another. “I thought it was my tower,” she whispered. “The Amaranth that never dies but only lives forever to watch men die.”

  “It’s all of us,” he sighed. In the distance, thunder rumbled. “We all build towers, then dare each other to enter…” He picked up the little rose in its skull-pot and stood abruptly; she followed him to the stairs.

  “Where are you going with my rose?”

  “Out.”

  She followed him down, protesting, “But it’s mine!”

  “You said we could choose anything.”

  “It’s just a worthless thing I grew, it’s nothing of the tower’s treasure. If you must take after all, choose something worth your life!”

  He glanced back at her, as they rounded the tower stairs to the bottom. His face was bone-white, but he could still smile. “I will give you back your rose,” he said, “if you will let me take the Amaranth.”

  “But I am the only Amaranth.”

  He strode past his startled companions, whose hands were heaped with this, no this, and maybe this. As if the dragon’s magical eye had opened in his own eye, he led her himself into the dragon’s mouth.

  The Snow Queen

  Kay

  They stood together without touching, watching the snow fall. The sudden storm prolonging winter had surprised the city; little moved in the broad streets below them. Ancient filigreed lamps left from another century threw patterned wheels of light into the darkness, illumining the deep white silence crusting the world. Gerda, not hearing the silence, spoke.

  “They look like white rose petals endlessly falling.”

  Kay said nothing. He glanced at his watch, then at the mirror across the room. The torchières gilded them: a lovely couple, the mirror said. In the gentle light Gerda’s sunny hair looked like polished bronze; his own, shades paler, seemed almost white. Some trick of shadow flattened Gerda’s face, erased its familiar hollows. Her petal-filled eyes were summer blue. His own face, with sharp bones at cheek and jaw, dark eyes beneath pale brows, looked, he thought, wild and austere: a monk’s face, a wizard’s face. He searched for some subtlety in Gerda’s, but it would not yield to shadow. She wore a short black dress; on her it seemed incongruous, like black in a flower.

  He commented finally, “Every time you speak, flowers fall from your mouth.”

  She looked at him, startled. Her face regained contours; they were graceful but uncomplex. She said, “What do you mean?” Was he complaining? Was he fanciful? She blinked, trying to see what he meant.

  “You talk so much of flowers,” he explained patiently. “Do you want a garden? Should we move to the country?”

  “No,” she said, horrified, then amended: “Only if—Do you want to? If we wer
e in the country, there would be nothing to do but watch the snow fall. There would be no reason to wear this dress. Or these shoes. But do you want—”

  “No,” he said shortly. His eyes moved away from her; he jangled coins in his pocket. She folded her arms. The dress had short puffed sleeves, like a little girl’s dress. Her arms looked chilled, but she made no move away from the cold, white scene beyond the glass. After a moment he mused, “There’s a word I’ve been trying all day to think of. A word in a puzzle. Four letters, the clue is: the first word schoolboys conjugate.”

  “Schoolboys what?”

  “Conjugate. Most likely Latin.”

  “I don’t know any Latin,” she said absently.

  “I studied some…but I can’t remember the first word I was taught. How could anyone remember?”

  “Did you feed the angelfish?”

  “This morning.”

  “They eat each other if they’re not fed.”

  “Not angelfish.”

  “Fish do.”

  “Not all fish are cannibals.”

  “How do you know not angelfish in particular? We never let them go hungry; how do we really know?”

  He glanced at her, surprised. Her hands tightened on her arms; she looked worried again. By fish? he wondered. Or was it a school of fish swimming through deep, busy waters? He touched her arm; it felt cold as marble. She smiled quickly; she loved being touched. The school of fish darted away; the deep waters were empty.

  “What word,” he wondered, “would you learn first in a language? What word would people need first? Or have needed, in the beginning of the world? Fire, maybe. Food, most likely. Or the name of a weapon?”

  “Love,” she said, gazing at the snow, and he shook his head impatiently.

  “No, no—cold is more imperative than love; hunger overwhelms it. If I were naked in the snow down there, cold would override everything; my first thought would be to warm myself before I died. Even if I saw you walking naked toward me, life would take precedence over love.”

  “Then cold,” she said. Her profile was like marble, flawless, unblinking. “Four letters, the first word in the world.”