Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He wanted suddenly to feel her smooth marble cheek under his lips, kiss it into life. He said instead, “I can’t remember the Latin word for cold.” She looked at him, smiling again, as if she had felt his impulse in the air between them. His thoughts veered off-balance, tugged toward her fine, flushed skin and delicate bones, something nameless, blind and hungry in him reaching toward another nameless thing. She said,

  “There’s the cab.”

  It was a horse-drawn sleigh; the snow was too deep for ordinary means. Had she been smiling, he wondered, because she had seen the cab? He kissed her anyway, lightly on the cheek, before she turned to get her coat, thinking how long he had known her and how little he knew her and how little he knew of how much or little there was in her to know.

  Gerda

  They arrived at Selene’s party fashionably late. She had a vast flat with an old-fashioned ballroom. Half the city was crushed into it, despite the snow. Prisms of ice dazzled in the chandeliers; not even the hundred candles in them could melt their glittering, frozen jewels. On long tables, swans carved of ice held hothouse berries, caviar, sherbet between their wings. A business acquaintance attached himself to Kay; Gerda, drifting toward champagne, was found by Selene.

  “Gerda!” She kissed air enthusiastically around Gerda’s face. “How are you, angel? Such a dress. So innocent. How do you get away with it?”

  “With what?”

  “And such a sense of humor. Have you met Maurice? Gerda, Maurice Crow.”

  “Call me Bob,” said Maurice Crow to Gerda, as Selene flung her fruity voice into the throng and hurried after it.

  “Why?”

  Maurice Crow chuckled. “Good question.” He had a kindly smile, Gerda thought; it gentled his thin, aging, beaky face. “If you were named Maurice, wouldn’t you rather be called Bob?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gerda said doubtfully. “I think I would rather be called my name.”

  “That’s because you’re beautiful. A beautiful woman makes any name beautiful.”

  “I don’t like my name. It sounds like something to hold stockings up with. Or a five-letter word from a Biblical phrase.” She glanced around the room for Kay. He stood in a ring of brightly dressed women; he had just made them laugh. She sighed without realizing it. “And I’m not really beautiful. This is just a disguise.”

  Maurice Crow peered at her more closely out of his black, shiny eyes. He offered her his arm; after a moment she figured out what to do with it. “You need a glass of champagne.” He patted her hand gently. “Come with me.”

  “You see, I hate parties.”

  “Ah.”

  “And Kay loves them.”

  “And you,” he said, threading a sure path among satin and silk and clouds of tulle, “love Kay.”

  “I have always loved Kay.”

  “And now you feel he might stop loving you? So you come here to please him.”

  “How quickly you understand things. But I’m not sure if he is pleased that I came. We used to know each other so well. Now I feel stupid around him, and slow, and plain, even when he tells me I’m not. It used to be different between us.”

  “When?”

  She shrugged. “Before. Before the city began taking little pieces of him away from me. He used to bring me wildflowers he had picked in the park. Now he gives me blood-red roses once a year. Some days his eyes never see me, not even in bed. I see contracts in his eyes, and the names of restaurants, expensive shoes, train schedules. A train schedule is more interesting to him than I am.”

  “To become interesting, you must be interested.”

  “In Kay? Or in trains?”

  “If,” he said, “you can no longer tell the difference, perhaps it is Kay who has grown uninteresting.”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “Never to me.” She had flushed. With the quick, warm color in her face and the light spilling from the icy prisms onto her hair, into her eyes, she caused Maurice Crow to hold her glass too long under the champagne fountain. “He is beautiful and brilliant, and we have loved each other since we were children. But it seems that, having grown up, we no longer recognize one another.” She took the overflowing glass from Maurice Crow’s hand and drained it. Liquid from the dripping glass fell beneath her chaste neckline, rolled down her breast like icy tears. “We are both in disguise.”

  The Snow Queen

  Neva entered late. She wore white satin that clung to her body like white clings to the calla lily. White peacock feathers sparkling with faux diamonds trailed down her long ivory hair. Her eyes were black as the night sky between the winter constellations. They swept the room, picked out a face here: Gerda’s—How sweet, Neva thought, to have kept that expression, like one’s first kiss treasured in tissue paper—and there: Kay’s. Her eyes were wide, very still. The young man with her said something witty. She did not hear. He tried again, his eyes growing anxious. She watched Kay tell another story; the women around him—doves, warblers, a couple of trumpeting swans—laughed again. He laughed with them, reluctant but irresistibly amused by himself. He lifted champagne to his lips; light leaped from the cut crystal. His pale hair shone like the silk of Neva’s dress; his lips were shaped cleanly as the swan’s wing. She waited, perfectly still. Lowering his glass, the amused smile tugging again at his lips, he saw her standing in the archway across the room.

  To his eye she was alone; the importunate young lapdog beside her did not exist. So his look told her, as she drew at it with the immense and immeasurable pull of a wayward planet wandering too close to someone’s cold, bright, inconstant moon. The instant he would have moved, she did, crossing the room to join him before his brilliant, fluttering circle could scatter. Like him, she preferred an audience. She waited in her outer orbit, composed, mysterious, while he told another story. This one had a woman in it—Gerda—and something about angels or fish.

  “And then,” he said, “we had an argument about the first word in the world.”

  “Coffee,” guessed one woman, and he smiled appreciatively.

  “No,” suggested another.

  “It was for a crossword puzzle. The first word you learn to conjugate in Latin.”

  “But we always speak French in bed,” a woman murmured. “My husband and I.”

  Kay’s eyes slid to Neva. Her expression remained changeless; she offered no word. He said lightly, “No, no, ma chère, one conjugates a verb; one has conjugal relations with one’s spouse. Or not, as the case may be.”

  “Do people still?” someone wondered. “How boring.”

  “To conjugate,” Neva said suddenly in her dark, languid voice, “means to inflect a verb in an orderly fashion through all its tenses. As in: amo, amas, amat. I love, you love—”

  “But that’s it!” Kay cried. “The answer to the puzzle. How could I have forgotten?”

  “Love?” someone said perplexedly. Neva touched her brow delicately.

  “I cannot,” she said, “remember the Latin word for dance.”

  “You do it so well,” Kay said a moment later, as they glided onto the floor. So polished it was that the flames from the chandeliers seemed frozen underfoot, as if they danced on stars. “And no one studies Latin anymore.”

  “I never tire of learning,” Neva said. Her gloved hand lay lightly on his shoulder, close to his neck. Even in winter his skin looked warm, burnished by tropical skies, endless sun. She wanted to cover that warmth with her body, draw it into her own white-marble skin. Her eyes flicked constantly around the room over his shoulder, studying women’s faces. “Who is Gerda?” she asked, then knew her: the tall, beautiful, childlike woman who watched Kay with a hopeless, forlorn expression, as if she had already lost him.

  “She is my wife,” Kay said, with a studied balance of lightness and indifference in his voice. Neva lifted her hand off his shoulder, settled it again closer to his skin.

  “Ah.”

  “We have known each other all our lives.”

  “She loves you still.�
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  “How do you know?” he said, surprised. She guided him into a half turn, so that for a moment he faced his abandoned Gerda, with her sad eyes and downturned mouth, standing in her naive black dress, her champagne tilted and nearly spilling, with only a cadaverous, beaky man trying to get her attention. Neva turned him again; he looked at her, blinking, as if he had been lightly, unexpectedly struck. She shifted her hand, crooked her fingers around his bare neck.

  “She is very beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “It is her air of childlike innocence that is so appealing.”

  “And so exasperating,” he exclaimed suddenly, as if, like the Apostle, he had been illumined by lightning and stunned with truth.

  “Innocence can be,” Neva said.

  “Gerda knows so little of life. We have lived for years in this city and still she seems so helpless. Scattered. She doesn’t know what she wants from life; she wouldn’t know how to take it if she did.”

  “Some women never learn.”

  “You have. You are so elegant, so sophisticated. So sure.” He paused; she saw the word trembling on his lips. She held his gaze, pulled him deeper, deeper into her winter darkness. “But,” he breathed, “you must have men telling you this all the time.”

  “Only if I want them to. And there are not many I choose to listen to.”

  “You are so beautiful,” he said wildly, as if the word had been tormented out of him.

  She smiled, slid her other hand up his arm to link her fingers behind his neck. She whispered, “And so are you.”

  The Thief

  Briony watched Gerda walk blindly through the falling snow. It caught on her lashes, melted in the hot, wet tears on her cheeks. Her long coat swung carelessly open to the bitter cold, revealing pearls, gold, a hidden pocket in the lining in which Briony envisioned cash, cards, earrings taken off and forgotten. She gave little thought to Gerda’s tears: some party, some man, it was a familiar tale.

  She shadowed Gerda, walking silently on the fresh-crushed snow of her footprints, which was futile, she realized, since they were nothing more than a wedge of toe and a rapier stab of stiletto heel. Still, in her tumultuous state of mind, the woman probably would not have noticed a traveling circus behind her.

  She slid, shadow-like, to Gerda’s side.

  “Spare change?”

  Gerda glanced at her; her eyes flooded again; she shook her head helplessly. “I have nothing.”

  Briony’s knife snicked open, flashing silver in a rectangle of window light. “You have a triple strand of pearls, a sapphire dinner ring, a gold wedding ring, a pair of earrings either diamond or cubic zirconium, on, I would guess, fourteen-karat posts.”

  “I never got my ears pierced,” Gerda said wearily. Briony missed a step, caught up with her.

  “Everyone has pierced ears!”

  “Diamond, and twenty-two-karat gold.” She pulled at them, and at her rings. “They were all gifts from Kay. You might as well have them. Take my coat, too.” She shrugged it off, let it fall. “That was also a gift.” She tugged the pearls at her throat; they scattered like luminous, tiny moons around her in the snow. “Oh, sorry.”

  “What are you doing?” Briony breathed. The woman, wearing nothing more than a short and rather silly dress, turned to the icy darkness beyond the window light. She had actually taken a step into it when Briony caught her arm. “Stop!” Briony hauled her coat out of the snow. “Put this back on. You’ll freeze!”

  “I don’t care. Why should you?”

  “Nobody is worth freezing for.”

  “Kay is.”

  “Is he?” She flung the coat over Gerda’s shoulders, pulled it closed. “God, woman, what Neanderthal age are you from?”

  “I love him.”

  “So?”

  “He doesn’t love me.”

  “So?”

  “If he doesn’t love me, I don’t want to live.”

  Briony stared at her, speechless, having learned from various friends in extremis that there was no arguing with such crazed and muddled thinking. Look, she might have said, whirling the woman around to shock her. See that snowdrift beside the wall? Earlier tonight that was an old woman who could have used your coat. Or: Men have notoriously bad taste, why should you let one decide whether you live or die? Or: Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

  She lied instead. She said, “I felt like that once.”

  She caught a flicker of life in the still, remote eyes. “Did you? Did you want to die?”

  “Why don’t we go for hot chocolate and I’ll tell you about it?”

  They sat at the counter of an all-night diner, sipping hot chocolate liberally laced with brandy from Briony’s flask. Briony had short, dark, curly hair and sparkling sapphire eyes. She wore lace stockings under several skirts, an antique vest of peacock feathers over a shirt of simulated snakeskin, thigh-high boots, and a dark, hooded cape with many hidden pockets. The waitress behind the counter watched her with a sardonic eye and snapped her gum as she poured Briony’s chocolate. Drawn to Gerda’s beauty and tragic pallor, she kept refilling Gerda’s cup. So did Briony. Briony, improvising wildly, invented a rich, beautiful, upper-class young man whose rejection of her plunged her into despair.

  “He loved me,” she said, “for the longest night the world has ever known. Then he dumped me like soggy cereal. I was just another pretty face and recycled bod to him. Three days after he offered me marriage, children, cars as big as luxury liners, trips to the family graveyard in Europe, he couldn’t even remember my name. Susie, he called me. Hello, Susie, how are you, what can I do for you? I was so miserable I wanted to eat mothballs. I wanted to lie on the sidewalk and sunburn myself to death. The worms wouldn’t have touched me, I thought. Not even they could be interested.”

  “What did you do?” Gerda asked. Briony, reveling in despair, lost her thread of invention. The waitress refilled Gerda’s cup.

  “I knew a guy like that,” the waitress said. “I danced on his car in spiked heels. Then I slashed his tires. Then I found out it wasn’t his car.”

  “What did I do?” Briony said. “What did I do?” She paused dramatically. The waitress had stopped chewing her gum, waiting for an answer. “Well—I mean, of course I did what I had to. What else could I do, but what women like me do when men dropkick their hearts out of the field. Women like me. Of course women like you are different.”

  “What did you do?” Gerda asked again. Her eyes were wide and very dark; the brandy had flushed her cheeks. Drops of melted snow glittered like jewels in her disheveled hair. Briony gazed at her, musing.

  “With money, you’d think you’d have more choices, wouldn’t you? But money or love never taught you how to live. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. So if Kay doesn’t love you, you have to wander into the snow and freeze. But women like me, and Brenda here—”

  “Jennifer,” the waitress muttered.

  “Jennifer, here, we’re so used to fending for ourselves every day that it gets to be a habit. You’re not used to fending, so you don’t have the habit. So what you have to do is start pretending you have something to live for.”

  Gerda’s eyes filled; a tear dropped into her chocolate. “I haven’t.”

  “Of course you haven’t, that’s what I’ve been saying. That’s why you have to pretend—”

  “Why? Its easier just to walk back out into the snow.”

  “But if you keep pretending and pretending, one day you’ll stumble onto something you care enough to live for, and if you turn yourself into an icicle now because of Kay, you won’t be able to change your mind later. The only thing you’re seeing in the entire world is Kay. Kay is in both your eyes, Kay is your mind. Which means you’re only really seeing one tiny flyspeck of the world, one little puzzle piece. You have to learn to see around Kay. It’s like staring at one star all the time and never seeing the moon or planets or constellations—”


  “I don’t know how to pretend,” Gerda said softly. “Kay has always been the sky.”

  Jennifer swiped her cloth at a crumb, looking thoughtful. “What she says,” she pointed out, tossing her head at Briony, “you only have to do it one day at a time. Always just today. That’s all any of us do.”

  Gerda took a swallow of chocolate. Jennifer poured her more; Briony added brandy.

  “After all,” Briony said, “you could have told me to piss off and mind my own business. But you didn’t. You put your coat back on and followed me here. So there must have been something—your next breath, a star you glimpsed—you care enough about.”

  “That’s true,” Gerda said, surprised. “But I don’t remember what.”

  “Just keep pretending you remember.”

  Kay

  Kay sat at breakfast with Neva, eating clouds and sunlight. Actually, it was hot biscuits and honey that dripped down his hand. Neva, discoursing on the likelihood of life on other planets, leaned across the table now and then and slipped her tongue between his fingers to catch the honey. Her face and her white negligee, a lacy tumble of roses, would slide like light past his groping fingers; she would be back in her chair, talking, before he could put his biscuit down.

  “The likelihood of life on other planets is very, very great,” she said. She had a crumb of Kay’s breakfast on her cheek. He reached across the table to brush it away; she caught his forefinger in her mouth and sucked at it until he started to melt off the chair onto his knees. She loosed his finger then and asked, “Have you read Piquelle on the subject?”

  “What?”

  “Piquelle,” she said patiently, “on the subject of life on other planets.”

  He swallowed. “No.”

  “Have another biscuit, darling. No, don’t move, I’ll get it.”

  “It’s no—”

  “No, I insist you stay where you are. Don’t move.” She took his plate and stood up. He could see the outline of her pale, slender body under the lace. “Did you say something, Kay?”