Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Congratulations, my sweets, I’m sure you’ll both be so happy. Kay, there is someone I want you to—”

  “Why are you going with Foxx?” Kay persisted. “He scatters hearts behind him like other people scatter bad checks.”

  “Don’t be bitter, Kay,” Foxx said genially. “We all find our last loves, as you have. Gerda, there is someone—”

  “Tomorrow,” Gerda said calmly, “I am going to make nine arrangements: two funerals, a birthday, three weddings, two hospital, and one anniversary. I am also going to find an orchid supplier and do the monthly accounts.”

  “You’re not going with Foxx.”

  “Of course she is,” Foxx said.

  Gerda took her eyes briefly from Kay to look at him. “I prefer my plants,” she said simply.

  An odd sound cut through the noise of the party, as if in the distance something immense had groaned and cracked in two. Kay turned suddenly, pushed the champagne glasses into Neva’s hands.

  “May I come—” His voice trembled so badly he stopped, began again. “May I come to your shop tomorrow and buy a flower?”

  She worked a strand of hair loose from behind her ear and twirled it around one finger, another gesture he remembered. “Perhaps,” she said coolly. He saw the tears in her eyes, like the sheen on melting, sunlit ice. He did not know if they were tears of love or pain; perhaps, he thought, he might never know, for she had walked through light and shadow while he had encased himself in ice. “What flower?”

  “I read once there is a language of flowers. Given by people to one another, they turn into words like love, anger, forgiveness. I will have to study the language to know what flower I need to ask for.”

  “Perhaps,” she said tremulously, “you should try looking some place other than language for what you want.”

  He was silent, looking into her eyes. The icy air outside cracked again, a lightning-whip of sound that split through the entire city. Around them, people held one another and laughed, even those perhaps somewhat disappointed that life had lost the imminence of danger, and that the world would continue its ancient, predictable ways. Neva handed the mute and grumpy Foxx one of the champagne glasses she held. She drained the other and, smiling her faint, private smile, passed on in search of colder climes.

  Ash, Wood, Fire

  Black, her eye said. Cinder black. And smooth. Black moved under her eye. She moved, too, pulling her face out of the crook of her elbow, into dawn. Gray light spilled over everything: gray stones, gray hearth, gray ashes on her hands. The black moved, bumping against her arm. She sat up quickly, making a grating morning sound in her throat. Black beetle, slow, and long as her thumb. The stones had grown cold under her. She flicked the beetle onto its back, watched it wave its legs, crawl on air. Then she blew it upright. It lumped away towards the hearth, where it would blaze like a coal in her fire. She straightened, yawning, pushing matted ribbons of hair into her cap. The beetle disappeared under the grate.

  She blew embers alive, piled chips and sticks, and blew, piled more sticks and bark, and blew, and then the wood. Something tiny wailed and snapped, sap bubbled. She burned hearts, bones, black beetles. The warmth touched her face; she closed her eyes. The warmth seeped into her; she was the warmth, warm. Warm, she thought; warm, she breathed. Almost warm enough to come alive. Sap in the wood, seed in the earth, warming…

  A beetle lumbered, loud and black, grumbling behind her. She hadn’t burned it. Or she had, and in the fire it had grown enormous.

  “—at her, dreaming, with fires to be…fires…”

  Fires.

  She moved to other hearths in the vast kitchen, blowing, coaxing, growing fire in the stone ovens, under great kettles of icy water that ham-hands, red with cold, hung to sway in front of her face. The kitchen filled with the sound. A kettle heaved in front of her, splashing water onto her flame. Ash hissed, smoked. A word licked at her ear; a hand, wet and hard, felt for something under her apron. She made a noise, twisting, picking a smoldering stick out of the fire. A haunch nudged her; she sprawled on stones.

  “Nothing but bone; dogs wouldn’t sniff at you, they wouldn’t bother. Kitchen scraps have more on them.”

  “Leave her alone,” the Beetle said in her flat, harsh, rasping voice. “Leave her to work, then, or I’ll toss you to the hounds, you pale horny toad. Slug. Get those kettles hissing. You. Girl. What is her name?” she asked, exasperated, of the hanging sausages. “Does she have one?”

  Every morning, every morning.

  “Anastasia.”

  “Rosamunda.”

  “She never said.”

  “She can’t speak.”

  “She can.”

  “Isolde.”

  “I can talk,” she said, her back to them all. “Talk,” said the fire. “Talk,” said the dripping, hissing kettle. A face, in its shiny, battered side, looked back at her, distorted in the dents. The nose dipped sideways, the chin veered, melted into a pool.

  “Talk, then,” someone said. “Tell us your name.”

  The face had no name. She sniffed instead, swiped her nose against her shoulder. Pots laughed, knives snickered in the bacon; an oven door screeched, clanged shut.

  “My name is Ash,” she said. “My name is Wood. My name is Fire.”

  “Her name is Patch,” someone said, high and grating, through his nose. “Patch, from Thickum Spinney. Salt. Salt, over here.”

  Salt ran behind her, little light steps on the stones.

  “No,” argued a furiously stirred pot. “That was the last fire we had. This one’s new.”

  “Naawoh,” a spattering pan said derisively. “This one’s been here forever. You’re new.”

  “Five years,” Pot huffed.

  “That’s new. Fire’s been here forever.”

  “Fire!” the Beetle snapped. “Over here!”

  She made, she made, until the kitchen grew thick, sultry with smoke and steam and smells. Perfumed maids, black flowers, scented the steam as they picked up copper water cans; black stalks of gentlemen appeared and disappeared into the mists, then came back again, for vast silver trays upon which Flower, mute and stunted man, laid a single rose, a white carnation. The argument flared intermittently, little flames here, there, springing to life, sinking.

  “The other was shorter.”

  “This is the other. She grew.”

  “That high? Overnight?”

  “You don’t notice,” the Beetle said abruptly. “In here. Faces always coming and going. Chopper! Apples, apples, keep them coming. You. Onions. A mountain of onions. A swimming sea of onions. Chop them small as babies’ teeth.”

  “The other’s hair was light.”

  “How could you tell? She’s ash, head to foot. She drifts, hearth-creature. Puff at her and she’d waft apart.”

  “This one’s too tall…”

  “Pepper!”

  She tried to think back. Had she been smaller? Or had that been someone else? Fires content, for the moment, she took fresh hot bread from a basket, wedged herself out of the way in a corner of wall and hearth, pushed close to the warmth, and tore at the bread. Stone and fire, stone and fire, nothing else but that, no matter where she looked. Grate and ash, wood, armloads of wood, winter wood, summer wood, each with its smell of snow or sun. Nothing more. Fire never counted years, neither did she. Still, dusted with bread crumbs, warm, nodding a little against the hard warm stones, she saw her hands, fingers gray and black with ash and char, nails broken, knuckles split with dryness and cold, an old mark or two where the fire had tried to eat her. Her hands belonged to fire. Had they ever done anything else? Had they been born smelling of char and sap?

  They were what hands looked like that belonged to fire.

  She had no other hands. None that had peeled an apple, placed a flower on a tray. She was Fire. What did years matter to fire?

  “Fire!”

  She moved, dodging around elbows, across floor slick with apple peel, her eyes searching, finding the dis
contented flame under a vast pan hung on a triple chain, heaped with butter and onion. Eyes stinging with smoke and onion, she heaved wood, built it up with her bare hands, angled this log on that, until the fire itself—billowing, snapping tree-bones, boiling tree-blood—drove her away with its hot breath.

  Fire. Wood. Ash.

  The black flowers began to return the silver trays, littered now with crusts and cold bacon fat, crumpled napkins, flowers withering in brown pools of tea and chocolate. A hillock of scraps began to grow in a great bowl for the Kitchen Dogs, the Beetle said, though there were no Kitchen Dogs, only Kennel Dogs, fed as carefully as princesses. Salt and Pepper and Choppers, Stirrers and Scrubbers passed and repassed the bowl; dipping into it, swift as birds, pecking away at the mound, a dart of hand, a suddenly rounded cheek. Fire ate only bread, finding tastes—the flood of salt, the sweet tang of orange peel—confusing, disturbing. They brought words into her head; they made her want to speak, though the words that pushed into her mouth were all in some peculiar language—the language that silk spoke, or perfume—and she could neither shape nor understand them.

  “Fire!”

  In a breath, between meals—the plates scrubbed from one, the quail braising for the next, onions and apples browning in butter, Pins rolling out piecrusts all down a long table, bread out and cooling—the argument flared again.

  “She was a little bit of a girl, with no front teeth. This one has teeth.” This from a Sauce so lovingly stirred it might have held the last cream, the last sugar, the last rosewater in the world.

  “Teeth grow.” This from the Kitchen-Beetle herself, huge circle of hips, round and black from behind, a circle of back, a small circle of black head, hair pulled into yet another circle at her neck, so fiercely and unshakably round it might have been carved of stone. Her heavy cheeks were cream threaded with veins of strawberry, her brows as pale as the marble pestles, her eyes shiny black insect eyes that saw everything and had no expression.

  “Not as quickly as all that.”

  “How often does anyone look?” Pastry, pressing rings of beaten egg whites out of a funnel, flung up his arms. Egg white squirted high; Salt watched, open-mouthed. Falling, it just missed the Sauce. “No one would look unless she wasn’t there making fires. She didn’t have teeth. She has teeth. Who has time to look?” His free hand pounced under the table, drew out a Chopper, small and dark, cheek full of something, his eyes and mouth clenched tightly shut, his body frozen by the hand at his neck. “Look at this one. Does he have front teeth or not?” The Sauce shrugged. Pantry pushed the Chopper back under the table. “Who knows? Who cares? None of them have names.”

  “I have teeth,” said the table. “I have a name. All of us have names.”

  “What’s hers, then, rat?”

  “Fire.”

  Pantry stamped under the table. “Cockroach. Get to work.”

  “She’s too tall,” muttered Sauce. Steam enveloped his face; he inhaled rapture, and forgot Fire.

  Then the nut pies went in, and the quails stuffed with apples and onions; the kitchen rats reeled, drunk with smells. She hauled wood constantly; going out to the snowy yard, piling it in her arms, taking deep breaths—not of the wild, golden spicy air, but of pitch and wet bark, the inner smells of trees, as varied to her as their names. She had no names for trees, only the pictures in her head that each wood scent conjured: some were dark and bristled, green all year; others stood pale and slender, wore leaves like lace and rustled with secrets at every breeze. The ovens set within the stones ate wood, ate forests. Pitch boiled and wailed, trees gave her their fragrances, their memories, clear to her even in the riot of kitchen smells, so that, kneeling at the grates, sweating, balancing logs, dodging smoke, brushing burning cinders back into the fire with her hands while the kitchen clattered and chopped and roared behind her, a green wood grew around her, the ghosts of trees.

  “Fire! Where’s that girl?” the Kitchen-Beetle snapped. “She might as well be a block of wood, for all she hears you. Where did she go? She was just there—”

  “I’m here,” she said from the heart of the wood, and the trees faded away.

  “Fire!”

  They descended from the upper world, the stately bearers of silver and copper, flowers and food. They bore away entire woods full of quail, whole vegetable gardens of salads, and came back for the nut orchard, and the cream from the milk of a hundred cows. They returned carrying bones, crusts, herbs trapped like green wings in hardening sauce. Scrubbers and Pluckers and Choppers snatched cold leftovers; Cooks, Bakers, Sauces, and the Beetle herself ate hot seasoned quail dripping with sauce, nut pies crusted with brown sugar and butter. Fire, dreamy with heat, ate bits of bread charred with ash, chopped apples that had hung on trees, food going gray in her fingers until it seemed she ate ash. The Kitchen-Beetle’s eye, bright and thoughtless as she gnawed birds, swiveled aimlessly and fell on Fire. As always, other eyes followed.

  “The other spoke more.”

  “This one is the other. She’s turning.”

  “Turning?”

  “Becoming,” the Beetle said impatiently. “They do. They all do. They put out leaves. They begin to dream.”

  “Her?” Sauce snickered. “She’s disappearing, more like it. She’s growing ash on her thick as bark. She can’t think much, she’s put together like twigs. Twigs for bones, wooden thoughts.”

  The Beetle looked at Fire, great white teeth tearing at quail, her eyes black as the underside of a pot, and as flat. She made a sound, between a snort and an inquiry, and tossed the bones.

  “It’s in the air,” the Beetle said. “She smells it. In the wood.” She heaved to her feet; Scraps ran among all their feet, collecting what they had let fall. She raised her voice. “Pluckers!”

  Geese, this time, their long white necks lolling across the thighs of Pluckers, trembling at every touch. Their feathers blew everywhere; fire scorched them, Sauce cursed them. Scraps leaped after them, snatching them as they floated. A snowdrift rose between the Pluckers; flurries of down, the last winter storm, swirled around Fire when she opened the door to bring in wood. The kitchen snow confused her; outside, in the melting snow, she smelled gold, she smelled water running slow and warm through still, secret woods. Inside was fire and snow still flying, through the tender green smells of wood.

  Mushrooms simmered in butter and rosemary over the flames; geese, headless, impaled, turned slowly on spits—the fires hissed and spattered with their fat. Cauldrons of potatoes and leeks boiled, spilling frothy water into the flames. She made, she made, coaxing drenched fire alive here, there, building and rebuilding next to ovens full of bread shaped into swans, of airy towers spun of egg white and sugar hardening in the heat. Chocolate, and raspberries frozen all winter, and hazelnuts pounded fine as dust, melted together under a flame, never high, never too low, teased with tidbits like a child. The world turned fire under her eyes, her busy fingers; she shaped potato flames, raspberry flames, geese flames, as if she were remaking everything out of fire, while pots were stirred, whisked away, others hung, and the voice of the Kitchen-Beetle wove the clutter and chaos around her into supper.

  Then she found herself dreaming in a darkening kitchen, a piece of potato half-eaten in her grimy hand. She leaned against a cooling oven. A solitary Scrubber splashed among the last of the pots. All around her, fires were burying themselves deep into heartwood, in the darkening hearths. A coal fell, a heart snapped—sang. The Kitchen-Beetle sat in the shadows, still and silent, watching, listening to the small noises. Fire watched her: the circles of her knees, her breasts, her darkened face. Cinders fumed. A pot settled on the rack. A flame sprang up, hid itself again. They sat, Fire against the oven stones, Kitchen-Beetle in her chair, in the heart of the fire, listening to the kitchen speak.

  The Beetle dwindled, went small, small, a moving bit of dark in the darkness. Fire dreamed of fire. An eye opened among the coals. It was green as leaves: her eye. Another opened. Another. The ring of hearths watc
hed her out of her eyes. A flame danced, spoke. Her voice, her word. She stirred against the stones, murmuring. Her cap brushed off; hair tumbled down, dark as wood. All her eyes watched the beetle crawl toward the hearth. It spoke as it passed her: a sudden gleam across its dark, polished back.

  “Fire,” it said, and she breathed the word, felt it dance across her heart, light as leaves, whispering, whispering. She rose finally, brought in wood, and water, and began to make.

  Morning found cold grates everywhere. Cooks, Sauces, Bakers milled bewilderedly, betrayed, calling, “Fire! Fire!” and never seeing her, while beside the door a young woman stood watching, tall and sapling-slender, her eyes as green as new leaves, her hair shiny as the beetle’s back, perfumed with wood. The lowly Scrubbers saw her first, and the Choppers, and Scraps and Stirrers; they flashed their teeth, or lack of them, grinning in wonder, as she opened the door to light.

  “Fire!” the Kitchen-Beetle called peremptorily to no one, to anyone, as if a ghost of ashes might rise out of a hearth, a little, smudged, graceless bundle of twigs, and begin to kindle herself alive, while Fire passed out of the kitchen into Spring.

  The Stranger

  Syl saw the stranger at ebb tide, standing among the tide pools, half-hidden by great hoary rocks slick with weed and moss and the living sea-things that clung to them. He watched the tide; she watched him as she walked along the shore road that ran between the sea and Liel’s sheep pastures. Behind him, the sky turned silken with twilight: rose and mauve and a deep, soft purple, colors she wanted to spin out of the air into thread for tapestries of no more substance than light. Everything in them would be nameless, she decided, her eyes still on the nameless man, like things in dreams… Then the stranger moved.

  He pulled something rectangular off his shoulder; his hands flicked across it, opening, pulling, twisting. Odd angles emerged from it, wings, cylinders, strings. He bent his head to it; his hands moved again. A single, deep note broke with a breaking wave, sighed away. A flurry of notes, flute and reed, spun into a gathering wave, and then more strings and a small drum, a single, flat beat, and the wave broke. Syl stopped, swallowing something like a sharp, sweet note in the back of her throat. Then she saw what he was doing to the sky, and the small notes danced along her bones.