Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Colors moved to his playing, shaped themselves. A cloudy purple wing stretched; an eye peered, whiter than the moon. A dark cloud rolled like tide across the sky; a graceful neck, a black and craggy profile rose out of it like smoke. Gold, a strand of light pulled from beneath the horizon, limned a claw, opening against the black, then plumed into a brilliant cloak of airy feathers. Syl felt the drum beat in the back of her throat.

  He is weaving with the sky, she thought. And then the music stopped.

  The sky darkened; he was a shadow against it, folding away his secrets, hanging them at his back. Then he blurred, or the night blurred over him. Still she stood motionless, trying to blink away the dark while all the color faded from the sky, and the tide among the broken shells played the only music.

  “I saw,” she said later to Liel, as she put a bowl of mutton stew in front of him. But she could not say what.

  “What, lass?” he asked absently, chewing; his eyes were full of sheep, shearing, skins, wool, lambs to keep, lambs to slaughter. His eyes cleared slowly at her silence; he was seeing her again, his Syl, moving in and out of the firelight, quick, graceful, methodical, laying the bread to be cut on the oak cutting board, the oak-handled knife beside it, and the butter in its yellow crock. She put the back of her hand to her forehead, as she did when she was trying to remember. He waited. Then her hand lifted, her brows liked, raising brief furrows in her smooth forehead, and she sighed, meeting his eyes.

  “I don’t exactly know. I was daydreaming, most likely.” She sat, spreading her coarse skirt and coarser apron neatly, liking the feel of the rough blue weave and then the rougher cream. He ate another bite.

  “Where?”

  “Along the shore. I walked to Greta’s, to get some black wool from her, since we have so few black, and she has them thick as blackbirds in a field.”

  “That’s where you were, then.”

  “That’s where I was.”

  They ate a while. The fire whispered, snapped scents and burning stars into the air, whispered again. Liel finished, leaned back in his chair. Syl, musing over the twilight music, lifted her eyes and found his eyes on her. He smiled a little.

  “I was just watching you. The way your hands move in the light.”

  She smiled back, watching the fire pick out threads of brown and gold in his dark hair. He had gray eyes that always told her every thought. His expressions were uncomplicated and familiar: one for sheep, another for thunder, one for watching her weave, another for drinking beer with his brother, another for telling her his dreams, another for untying the ribbons in her hair, and then at her throat, and then at her breast.

  She rose, began to clear the table. He watched her a little longer, then got up to open the cottage door and listen to the night as it wrapped itself around the island. He did that every evening, smelling weather in scents of air and earth blowing across from the mainland, listening for unfamiliar noises among the sheep, for warnings in the distant barkings of farm dogs, listening for the tide, which he only heard on the stillest or the stormiest of nights.

  “It’s quiet,” he said at last, and closed the door. She dried the last dish, placed it on the shelf. Then, as she did every night, she stood at her loom, looking at her weaving in the dying firelight, studying the colors and patterns she had chosen. Liel came to stand beside her.

  “Pretty,” he said, and touched a pearl-gray strand running through a weave of lilac. Then he touched her arm. She turned and followed him to bed.

  The next morning, the sea mist swirled across Gamon Kyle’s fields, massed itself into a white, winged shape with blue, burning eyes. The fire that came out of its mouth was blue. As the smoke billowed up from Gamon’s hayfields, the farmers and fishers came running with buckets, or riding carts from the village full of barrels sloshing half the water out of them before they reached the fields. The animal shaped itself again above their heads. They stared, frozen with wonder at the sight of cloud furling into feather, sky igniting itself. Then the blue poured down again, and they heard the screams inside Gamon’s barn.

  By the time they got the fire out, most of Gamon’s fields were cinder and his barn was a skeleton of charred timber. He stumbled among the ruins carrying salvage: a rake with a burned handle, some harness, a curry comb.

  “What was that?” he kept asking hoarsely. “What was that?”

  “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Liel told Syl, coming in at midday sweating and streaked with char. She had been at her weaving all morning; the wind had swept smoke and fire in the opposite direction. She stared at him over her loom. Cinders had eaten his shirt to shreds, raised blisters on his skin. He wore an expression she had never seen before. “Enormous,” he said, as she coaxed the cloth from his body. “White. White mist. Its fire was blue. Like the sky. Like it had breathed in sky and turned it into flame. And then it turned Gamon’s farm into flame.”

  He winced as she peeled shirt from his shoulders, and she said, not even trying to make sense of fire in the sky, “I’ll fetch water. Oh, Liel. Did he lose it all?”

  “All but a couple of hens.”

  “His horses?” she breathed in horror. He nodded, still wide-eyed, stunned with wonder.

  “It might have been beautiful,” he said absurdly, “if it hadn’t been so terrible.”

  She shook her head mutely at his babbling. “Sit down,” she said gently. “Let me take your boots off. Then I’ll get water.”

  “Don’t bother with it. I’ll go sit in the stream a while. Syl, I wish you could have seen it. Fearful and deadly, but like—a great wave, or a mountain exploding. You hate what it does, but it’s like nothing you could ever imagine, nothing—” He swallowed, all the words crowding into his eyes. Syl dropped his smoldering boots outside the door. She looked up at the sky suddenly, trying to connect it with fire. It held a cloud and a couple of blackbirds. She went back inside to help Liel with his trousers.

  The next day, Greye Hamil’s barn and apple orchards burned; the smell of scorched green apples spread clear across the island. The day after that something clawed furrows a foot deep down the length of the village street, and nine fishing boats moored at the dock turned into charred husks. Dogs were chained up, doors were barred, no one ventured out but Syl, who had come into the village with the shawl she had woven, to leave it at the shop that sold her work. The silence, the deep scars in the street amazed her; so did the shop’s barred door.

  She tapped on a window until the shopkeeper opened the door and pulled her hastily inside.

  “Syl Reed,” she said, a heavy woman with a plump rosy face and perpetually startled eyes. “What possessed you?”

  “I brought this,” Syl said bewilderedly, unfolding the shawl. A butterfly opened its green and peacock blue wings against a filigree of cream wool. The shopkeeper folded her hands under her chin and forgot the fire.

  “Oh, Syl, it’s lovely, so lovely.” Then the terror came back into her eyes. She took the shawl and drew Syl toward the back of the shop. “You can’t go home now, not alone.”

  “I must,” Syl said, eluding her fingers. “I left stock simmering on the hearth. What has gotten into this village?”

  “It’s the things.”

  “What things?”

  “The things—Syl, where have you been the past three days?”

  “Weaving,” Syl said blankly. “You know how I get when I work.” She stopped abruptly, her own eyes widening, as she remembered the unfamiliar expression on Liel’s face. “Things. Something terrible, he said. Something beautiful. And then—he kept talking about the sky.”

  “Cloud,” the shopkeeper said. “It forms itself out of cloud.”

  Syl touched her throat, where a word had stuck. She whispered, “Oh.”

  “And it burns everything with fire the color of the sky.” She paused, sniffing. “Something’s burning,” she wailed, and Syl wrenched open the door.

  The smoke came from the little wood between Liel’s pastures and the sea. Running,
feeling the heat from the billowing flames, she turned off the road, cut a corner through the trees, and climbed the stone wall into the summer pastures. She stopped then, sobbing for breath, transfixed by what hung in the sky.

  Its wings, spanning the length of the field, were teal and purple and bronze. They tapered to an angle along an intricate web of bone, then the pelt or glistening scales parted here and there into a loose, trailing weave through which ovals of blue sky hung. The head, secret and proud like a swan’s, rose on a graceful swan’s neck of gold. Its claws were gold. Its eyes were huge, lucent, gold moons.

  Its shadow spread across the upturned faces of farmers and villagers who had abandoned the fire to wield pitchforks and rakes against it. The sheep had pushed into a noisy, terrified huddle against the field wall. As Syl stared, the great head dipped downward, precisely as a bird’s, and caught a black lamb in its mouth. It stretched upward again, higher than seemed possible, tossed the lamb into the air, let it fall free to shatter itself against the ground, then caught it, with a flick of claw, at the last moment. Blood sprayed across the sheep, across the upturned faces.

  Syl ran again, scarcely realizing she moved, seeing only Liel among the islanders. She pushed into the crowd, heard his soft grunt of dismay as he saw her. She gripped his arm and heard someone say, “For a price.”

  She saw the stranger among them.

  His eyes were cold and dark as night, his hair as white as spume. He might have come out of the sea; his skin had little more color than mist. His rectangular box of secret music hung from his shoulder, revealing nothing, not a string or a singing reed. “For a price,” he repeated to the silent crowd. He had a singer’s voice, each word precise and modulated. He was tall and lithe and still, Syl sensed, as a stone. A part of him was that hard, that ancient. He seemed to her scarcely more human than the beautiful, deadly thing in the air above him. “I have seen these monsters invade before. They are ruthless. Your island is tiny. They will destroy it day by day, until by summer’s end it will be little more than a charred cinder rising out of the sea. And on that, they will live.”

  The monster loosed a stream of blood-red silk, red wind, out of its mouth. Trees along the field wall flamed; sheep turned black. The din and the smell became sickening.

  Syl, still staring at the stranger, felt something crawl along her bones. She turned her face against Liel, but still she saw, behind her closed eyes, the cloudy wings forming above the sea to the stranger’s music.

  “What price?” a villager asked frantically: Sim Jame, who owned a tavern there. Mel Grower, with acres of nut trees and an oak wood, echoed him hoarsely, “What price?”

  The stranger named it.

  There was no sound for a moment, but from the sheep, and the silken fire breaking the bones of trees.

  “How can you control them?” Aron Avrel said abruptly, his face white and slick with sweat under his black beard. “Are you mage, or what? Did you follow these monsters or did you bring them? For a price you’ll help us. Help us into trouble, then help us out?”

  The stranger looked at him, his eyes holding no more expression than stones in a field. “Does it matter?” he asked. “You cannot control them. I have known them all my life.”

  “Show us,” Liel said, his voice grim, exhausted. The stranger looked at him, and then at Syl, standing with her fingers linked around Liel’s arm, her long red-gold hair tangled and tumbling around her face from her running, her eyes, golden-green as ripening hazelnuts, wide and stunned with recognition of the stranger’s face.

  Still his expression did not change. But his eyes did not move away from her as he slid the box off his shoulder. He pushed a lever or a knob, or perhaps he only reshaped air and wood with his fingers. A flute of ebony and gold lay half-cradled in the top of the box, half-extended into air. He bent his head, blew a few soft, breathy notes, and then a clear, wild, tuneless keening that brought tears, hot and stinging with smoke, into Syl’s eyes. The sheep stopped their din; the islanders stood motionless. The monster dipped its head dreamily toward the trees. It breathed in fire, or it grazed on fire, pulling strands of flame away from the burning leaves and branches until they stood charred and cold, shaking blackened leaves to the ground. Teal and bronze and flame coiled as the great wings closed around the last of the flames. Colors swirled, began, under the mad, haunting whirlwind of notes, to break apart. Fire turned to light, teal misted into sky. Purple lingered longest, Syl saw, a final streak of smoke or an edge of wing.

  The music stopped. The musician lifted his head. The sky was empty. Sun struck his face, traced a line beside his mouth, revealed faint shadows beneath his eyes. It was some time before anyone spoke.

  “That much,” Aron Avrel said slowly, “we’ll have to borrow from the mainland.”

  The stranger slid the flute back into wood and shadow. “They won’t wait for it,” he warned them.

  “But you’ll wait.”

  “I will.”

  There was argument, drunken and tumultuous, as the islanders cooled their smoke-dry throats with beer, and ate the bread and cheese and hot peppered lamb Syl set out for them. The stranger was mage, he was monster; they should kill him and steal his box. But no one could play it like he could, and then they’d be left with the monsters, and no telling how many of them there might be. They should send to the mainland for money; they should send to the mainland for help: any help would be cheaper than the stranger. But they knew where they could borrow money, but who knew where to find another mage that fast? Who knew the name of any mage, anywhere, anyway? Money, at least, could be found. Even if they had to borrow it against the price of the entire island. If the monsters didn’t turn it into a charred. rock, first.

  Syl saw them fed, refilled their cups, while Liel and others went to see what could be mended and what must be slaughtered of the sheep. The islanders drifted in and out of the cottage, arguing, and keeping an anxious eye on the sky. Syl wandered among them, fretting over Liel and seeing, now and then, instead of him the white-haired stranger with the burning trees behind him, bending over his flute, or standing at the sea’s edge, painting pictures with the sky.

  She went to her loom, searched for colors among her dyed wools: that teal, that deep purple. And how could she weave the wings themselves, she wondered, the graceful trailing filigree revealing ovals of sky? She wanted other colors suddenly, colors harder, brighter than wool. Liel made lists on scraps. She found a torn bit of paper and some ink. Salt, Liel had written on the paper. Salve for cow’s udder. She turned it over and began to sketch the wings.

  Near dawn, they smelled it again: the harsh, acrid smell of burning blown across the island. Liel groaned and dressed. Syl waited until he had gone before she dressed. She went out, saw the red glow on the other side of the village where Sly Granger had his hop fields. She stood a moment, the back of her hand against her brow, and tried to think. Then she didn’t think; she just guessed and ran across the pastures to the shore road, and then up it to where she had first seen the stranger.

  She found him sitting among the rocks, playing music softly. The tide was high; his back was to her. She watched him for a long time from behind a rock, while he sketched wings and faces, massive bodies that appeared and disappeared in the milky mist above the sea. The sky brightened; the mist turned opal, caught flashes of color he wove into his music. He plucked a string, piped a note; a line of wing appeared, an eye. Cloud separated into bone, scales, teeth. He drew another secret out of the box: thin bands of silver that, struck, sounded like high, sweet bells. The sounds turned into a flock of silver birds that flew into the mist.

  The sun rose, burning through the mist. He stopped playing finally and watched the lines of light flash and melt across the waves. Then he turned his head and looked at her.

  He did not move or speak, but he drew her across the sand, something alien, marvelous, incomprehensible that chance or wind had blown adrift onto the island. He watched her come, his eyes no longer expressionless,
but masking all expression. She said, looking at the bright, empty sky, and then at him, her voice strained with bewilderment, “They re yours. Those monsters. Those beautiful and terrible things. You make them.”

  “I am them,” he said. He folded away the silver bars and then the strings, into the impossibly shallow box. “We are what we make.”

  She thought above that, holding her hair out of her eyes with one hand against the strong morning wind. “Then you,” she said wearily, “are terrible and beautiful, weaving dreams and nightmares with cloud and fire, burning in a breath what small slow things we make through time. And for nothing. For money.”

  He was silent; again she felt something ancient, wild, inhuman in his stillness. “What,” he said finally, “do you make?”

  “I dye wool from the sheep you burned. I weave the colors into shawls, blankets, things to wear, to hang.”

  “For nothing?”

  She blinked, at an edge of cold air, or brine. “For money. It’s common pay for making things. But I make. I don’t unmake. You—” She drew breath slowly, her eyes straying again to the sky. “If I had your colors to make with. If I had the dreams behind your eyes. I would sit here on this beach and weave sea and sky and light until there was nothing left of me but bone to weave with. And then my bones would float away on all the colors of the sea.”

  There was a flick of expression, a spark off stone, in his eyes. “Colors. They’re everywhere.”

  “For you, maybe. Not for me. I don’t know how to make them. You think them into being. You don’t have to destroy for that. And you would be paid all the wealth you want.”

  “I told you, he said evenly, they are mine. They are what I am. They exist to destroy. They cease to exist when they cannot use their powers. They are made of light and fire. They must use themselves or die. It is what I make.”