Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I groaned.”

  “There are billions of galaxies. And in each galaxy, billions of stars, each of which might well have its courtiers orbiting it.” She reached into the dainty cloth in which the biscuits were wrapped. Through the window above the sideboard, snow fell endlessly; her hothouse daffodils shone like artificial light among the bone china, the crystal butter dish, the honey pot, the napkins patterned with an exotic flock of startled birds trying to escape beyond the hems. Kay caught a fold of her negligee between his teeth as she put his biscuit down. She laughed indulgently, pushed against his face and let him trace the circle of her navel through the lace with his tongue. Then she glided out of reach, sat back in her chair.

  “Think of it!”

  “I am.”

  “Billions of stars, billions of galaxies! And life around each star, eating, conversing, dreaming, perhaps indulging in startling alien sexual practices—Allow me, darling.” She thrust her finger deep into the honey, brought it out trailing a fine strand of gold that beaded into drops on the dark wood. As her finger rolled across his broken biscuit, she bent her head, licked delicately at the trail of honey on the table. Kay, trying to catch her finger in his mouth, knocked over his coffee. It splashed onto her hand.

  “Oh, my darling,” he exclaimed, horrified. “Did I burn you? Let me see!”

  “It’s nothing,” she said coolly, retrieving her hand and wiping it on her napkin. “I do not burn easily. Where were we?”

  “Your finger was in my biscuit,” he said huskily.

  “The point he makes, of course, is that with so many potential suns and an incredibly vast number of systems perhaps orbiting them, the chances are not remote for life—perhaps sophisticated, intelligent, technologically advanced—life, in essence, as we know it, circling one of those distant stars. Imagine!” she exclaimed, rapt, absently pulling apart a daffodil and dropping pieces of its golden horn down her negligee. The petal pieces seemed to Kay to burn here and there on her body beneath a frail web of white. “On some planet circling some distant, unnamed star, Kay and Neva are seated in a snowbound city, breakfasting and discussing the possibility of life on other planets. Is that not strange and marvelous?”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you think you might like me to remove some of those petals for you?”

  “What petals?”

  “The one, perhaps, caught between your breasts.”

  She smiled. “Of course, my darling.” As he leaped precipitously to his feet, scattering silverware, she added, “Oh, darling, hand me the newspaper.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I always do the crossword puzzle after breakfast. Don’t you? I like to time myself. Eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds was my fastest. What was yours?”

  She pulled the paper out of his limp hand, and watched, smiling faintly, as he flung himself groaning in despair across the table. His face lay in her biscuit crumbs; the spilled honey began to undulate slowly out of its pot toward his mouth; coffee spread darkly across the wood from beneath his belly. Neva leaned over his prone body, delicately sipped coffee. Then she opened her mouth against his ear and breathed a hot, moist sigh throughout his bones.

  “You have broken my coffee pot,” she murmured. “You must kneel at my feet while I work this puzzle. You will speculate, as I work, on the strange and wonderful sexual practices of aliens on various planets.”

  He slid off the table onto his knees in front of her. She propped the folded paper on his head. “Nine fifty-seven and fourteen seconds exactly. Begin, my darling.”

  “On the planet Debula, where people communicate not by voice but by a complex written arrangement whereby words are linked in seemingly arbitrary fashion by a similar letter in each word, and whose lawyers make vast sums of money interpreting and arguing over the meanings of the linked words, the men, being quite short, are fixated peculiarly on kneecaps. When faced with a pair, they are seized with indescribable longing and behave in frenzied fashion, first uncovering them and gazing raptly at them, then consuming whatever daffodil petal happens to be adhering to them, then moistening them all over in hope of eventually coaxing them apart…”

  “What is a four-letter synonym for the title of a novel by the Russian author Dostoyevsky?”

  “Idiot,” he sighed against her knees.

  “Ah. Fool. Thank you, my darling. Forgive me if I am somewhat inattentive, but your voice, like the falling snow, is wonderfully calming. I could listen to it all day. I know that, as you roam from planet to planet, you will come across some strange practice that will be irresistible to me, and I will begin to listen to you.” She crossed her legs abruptly, banging his nose with her knee. “Please continue with your tale, my darling. You may be as leisurely and detailed as you like. We have all winter.”

  Gerda

  Gerda heaved a fifty-pound sack of potting soil off the stack beside the greenhouse door and dropped it on her workbench. She slit it open with the sharp end of a trowel and began to scoop soil into three-inch pots sitting on a tray. The phone rang in the shop; she heard Briony say,

  “Four dozen roses? Two dozen each of Peach Belle and Firebird, billed to Selene Pray? You would like them delivered this afternoon?”

  Gerda began dropping pansy seeds into the pots. Beyond the tinted greenhouse walls it was still snowing: a long winter, they said, the longest on record. Gerda’s greenhouse—half a dozen long glass rooms, each temperature controlled for varied environments, lying side by side and connected by glass archways—stood on the roof of one of the highest buildings in the city. Gerda could see across the ghostly white city to the frozen ports where great freighters were locked in the ice. She had sold nearly all of her jewelry to have the nursery built and stocked in such a merciless season, but, once open, her business was brisk. People yearned for color and perfume, for there seemed no color in the world but white and no scent but the pure, blanched, icy air. It was rumored that the climatic change had begun, and the glaciers were beginning to move down from the north. Eventually, they would be seen pushing blindly through the streets, encasing the city in a cocoon of solid ice for a millennium or two. Some people, in anticipation of the future, were making arrangements to have themselves frozen. Others simply ordered flowers to replicate the truant season.

  “I’m taking a delivery,” Briony said in the doorway. “Jennifer isn’t back yet from hers.” She had cut her hair and dyed it white. It sprang wildly from her head in petals of various lengths, reminding Gerda of a chrysanthemum. Jennifer loved driving the truck and delivering flowers, but Briony pined in captivity. She compensated for it by wearing rich antique velvets and tapestries and collecting different kinds of switchblades. Gerda had persuaded her to work until spring; by then, she thought, Briony might be coaxed through another season. Meanwhile, spring dallied; Briony drooped.

  “All right,” Gerda said. “I’ll listen for the phone. Look, Briony, the lavender seedlings are coming up.”

  “Of course they’re coming up,” Briony said. “Everything you touch grows. If you dropped violets from the rooftop, they would take root in the snow. If you planted a shoe, it would grow into a shoetree.”

  “I want you to sell something for me.”

  Briony brightened. She kept her old business acquaintances by means of Gerda’s jewels, reassuring them that she had only temporarily abandoned crime to help a friend.

  “What?”

  “A sapphire necklace. I want more stock; I want to grow orchids. Stop by the flat. The necklace is in the safe beneath the still life. Do you know anyone who sells paintings?”

  “I’ll find someone.”

  “Good,” she said briskly, but she avoided Briony’s sharp eyes, for the dismantling of her great love was confined, as yet, only to odds and ends of property. The structure itself was inviolate. She turned away, began to water seedlings. The front bell jangled. She said, “I’ll see to it. You wrap the roses.”

  The man entering the shop made her heart stop. It was
Kay. It was not Kay. It might have been Kay once: tall, fair, with the same sweet smile, the same extravagance of spirit.

  “I want,” he said, “every flower in the shop.”

  Gerda touched hair out of her eyes, leaving a streak of potting soil on her brow. She smiled suddenly, at a memory, and the stranger’s eyes, vague with his own thoughts, saw beneath the potting sod and widened.

  “I know,” Gerda said. “You are in love.”

  “I thought I was,” he said confusedly.

  “You want all the flowers in the world.”

  “Yes.”

  He was oddly silent, then; Gerda asked, “Do you want me to help you choose which?”

  “I have just chosen.” He stepped forward. His eyes were lighter than Kay’s, a warm gold-brown. He laughed at himself, still gazing at her. “I mean yes. Of course. You choose. I want to take a woman to dinner tonight, and I want to give her the most beautiful flower in the world and ask her to marry me. What is your favorite flower?”

  “Perhaps,” Gerda suggested, “you might start with her favorite color, if you are unsure of her favorite flower.”

  “Well. Right now it appears to be denim.”

  “Denim. Blue?”

  “It’s hardly passionate, is it? Neither is the color of potting soil.”

  “I beg—”

  “Gold. The occasion begs for gold.”

  “Yellow roses?”

  “Do you like roses?”

  “Of course?”

  “But yellow for a proposal?”

  “Perhaps a winey red. Or a brilliant streaked orange.”

  “But what is your favorite flower?”

  “Fuchsias,” Gerda said, smiling. “You can hardly present her with a potted plant.”

  “And your favorite color?”

  “Black.”

  “Then,” he said, “I want a black fuchsia.”

  Gerda was silent. The stranger stepped close to her, touched her hand. She was on the other side of the counter suddenly, hearing herself babble.

  “I carry no black fuchsias. I’m a married woman, I have a husband—”

  “Where is your wedding ring?”

  “At home. Under my pillow. I sleep with it.”

  “Instead of your husband?” he said, so shrewdly her breath caught. He smiled. “Have dinner with me.”

  “But you love someone else!”

  “I stopped, the moment I saw you. I had a fever, the fever passed. Your eyes are so clear, like a spring day. Your lips. There must be a rose the color of your lips. Take me and your lips to the roses, let me match them.”

  “I can’t,” she said breathlessly. “I love my husband.”

  “Loving one’s spouse is quite old-fashioned. When was the last time he brought you a rose? Or touched your hand, like this? Or your lips. Like. This.” He drew back, looked into her eyes again. “What is your name?”

  She swallowed. “Why do you look so much like Kay? It’s unfair.”

  “But I’m so much nicer.”

  “Are you?”

  “Much,” he said, and slid his hand around her head to spring the clip on the pin that held her hair so that it tumbled down around her face. He drew her close, repeated the word against her lips. “Much.”

  “Much,” she breathed, and they passed the word back and forth a little.

  “I’m off,” Briony said, coming through the shop with her arms full of roses. Gerda, jumping, caught a glimpse of her blue, merry eyes before the door slammed. She gathered her hair in her hands, clipped it back.

  “No. No, no, no. I’m married to Kay.”

  “I’ll come for you at eight.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, and may I take you to a party after dinner?”

  “No.”

  “You might as well get used to me.”

  “No.”

  He kissed her. “At eight, then.” At the door, he turned. “By the way, do you have a name?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not. My name is Foxx. Two x’s. I’ll pick you up here, since I’m sure you don’t have a home, either.” He blew her a kiss. “Au revoir, my last love.”

  “I won’t be here.”

  “Of course not. Do you like sapphires?”

  “I hate them.”

  “I thought so. They’ll have to do until you are free to receive diamonds for your wedding.”

  “I am married to Kay.”

  “Sapphires, fuchsias, and denim. You see how much I know about you already. Chocolate?”

  “No!”

  “Champagne?”

  “Go away!”

  He smiled his light, brilliant smile. “After tonight, Kay will be only a dream, the way winter snow is a pale dream in spring. Tomorrow, the glaciers will recede, and the hard buds will appear on the trees. Tomorrow, we will smell the earth again, and the roiling, briny sea will crack the ice and the great ships will set sail to foreign countries and so shall you and I, my last love, set sail to distant and marvelous ports of call whose names we will never quite be able to pronounce, though we will remember them vividly all of our lives.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “At eight. I shall bring you a black fuchsia.”

  Spring

  “Dear Gerda,” Selene said. “Darling Foxx. How wonderful of you to come to my party. How original you look, Gerda. You must help me plan my great swan song, the final, definitive party ending all seasons. As the ice closes around us and traps us for history like butterflies in amber, the violinists will be lifting their bows, the guests swirling in the arms of their lovers, rebuffed spouses lifting their champagne glasses—it will be a splendid moment in time sealed and unchanged until the anthropologists come and chip us out of the ice. Do you suppose their excavations will be accompanied by the faint pop of champagne bubbles escaping the ice? Ah! There is Pilar O’Malley with her ninth husband. Darling Pilar is looking tired. It must be so exhausting hunting fortunes.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Foxx.

  “No,” said Gerda. She was wearing her short black dress in hope that Foxx would be discouraged by its primness. Her only jewels were a pair of large blue very faux pearls that Briony had pinched from Woolworth’s.

  “You came with me tonight. You will come with me tomorrow. You will flee this frozen city, your flowerpots, your patched denim—” He guided her toward the champagne, which poured like a waterfall through a cascade of Gerda’s roses. “And your defunct marriage, which has about as much life to it as a house empty of everything but memory.” He had been speaking so all evening, through champagne and quail, chocolates and port, endlessly patient, endlessly assured. The black silk fuchsia, a sapphire ring, a pair of satin heels, gloves with diamond cuffs were scattered in the back of his sleigh. Gerda, wearied and confused with too many words, too much champagne, felt as if the world were growing unfamiliar around her. There was no winter in Foxx’s words, no Kay, no flower shop. The world was becoming a place of exotic, sunlit ports where she must go as a stranger, and as another stranger’s wife. What of Briony, whom she had coaxed out of the streets? What of her lavender seedlings? Who would water her pansies? Who would order potting soil? She saw herself suddenly, standing among Selene’s rich, glittering guests and worrying about potting soil. She laughed. The world and winter returned; the inventions of the insubstantial stranger Foxx turned into dreams and air, and she laughed again, knowing that the potting soil would be there tomorrow and the ports would not.

  Across the room, Kay saw her laugh.

  For a moment he did not recognize her; he had never seen her laugh like that. Then he thought, Gerda. The man beside her had taught her how to laugh.

  “My darling,” Neva said to him. “Will you get me champagne?” She did not wait for him to reply, but turned her back to him and continued her discussion with a beautiful and eager young man about the eternal truths in alchemy. Kay had no energy even for a disillusioned smile; he might have been made of ice for all the expression his face h
eld. His heart, he felt, had withered into something so tiny that when the anthropologists came to excavate Selene’s final party, his shrunken heart would be held a miracle of science, perhaps a foreshadowing of the physical advancement of future homo.

  He stood beside Gerda to fill the champagne glasses, but he did not look at her or greet her. Not even she could reach him, as far as he had gone into the cold, empty wastes of winter’s heart. Gerda, feeling a chill brush her, as of a ghost’s presence, turned. For a moment, she did not recognize Kay. She saw only a man grown so pale and weary she thought he must have lost the one thing in the world he had ever loved.

  Then she knew what he had lost. She whispered, “Kay.”

  He looked at her. Her eyes were the color of the summer skies none of them would see again: blue and full of light. He said, “Hello, Gerda. You look well.”

  “You look so sad.” She put her hand to her breast, a gesture he remembered. “You aren’t happy.”

  He shrugged slightly. “We make our lives.” His champagne glasses were full, but he lingered a moment in the warmth of her eyes. “You look happy. You look beautiful. Do I know that dress? Is it new?”

  She smiled. “No.” Foxx was beside her suddenly, his hand on her elbow.

  “Gerda?”

  “It’s old,” Gerda said, holding Kay’s eyes. “I no longer have much use for such clothes. I sold all the jewels you gave me to open a nursery. I grew all the roses you see here, and those tulips and the peonies.”

  “A nursery? In midwinter? What a brilliant and challenging idea. That explains the dirt under your thumbnail.”

  “Kay, my darling,” said Neva’s deep, languid voice behind them, “you forgot my champagne. Ah. It is little Gerda in her sweet frock.”

  “Yes,” Kay said. “She has grown beautiful.”

  “Have I?”

  “Gerda and I,” Foxx said, “are leaving the city tomorrow. Perhaps that explains her unusual beauty.”

  “You are going away with Foxx?” Kay said, recognizing him. “What a peculiar thing to do. You’ll fare better with your peonies.”