Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “On the way back…we drove through a wood…just today, it was… I had not found you a lark. I heard one singing. I sent the post boy looking one way, I searched another. I followed the lark’s song, and saw it finally, resting on the head of a great stone lion.” His face wrinkled and fought itself; words fell like stones, like the tread of a stone beast. “A long line of lions stretched up the steps of a huge castle. Vines covered it so thickly it seemed no light could pass through the windows. It looked abandoned. I gave it no thought. The lark had all my attention. I took off my hat and crept up to it. I had it, I had it…singing in my hat and trying to fly… And then the lion turned its head to look at me.”

  Lark shuddered; she could not speak. She felt her father shudder too.

  “It said, ‘You have stolen my lark.’ Its tail began to twitch. It opened its stone mouth wide to show me its teeth. ‘I will kill you for that.’ And it gathered its body into a crouch. I babbled—I made promises—I am not a young man to run from lions. My heart nearly burst with fear. I wish it had… I promised—”

  “What,” she whispered, “did you promise?”

  “Anything it wanted.”

  “And what did it want?”

  “The first thing that met me when I arrived home from my journey.” He hid his face against her, shaking her with his sobs. “I thought it would be the cat! It always suns itself at the gate! Or Columbine at worst—she always wants an excuse to leave her work. Why did you answer the door? Why?”

  Her eyes filled with sudden tears. “Because I heard the lark.”

  Her father lifted his head. “You shall not go,” he said fiercely. “I’ll bar the doors. The lion will never find you. If it does, I’ll shoot it, burn it—”

  “How can you harm a stone lion? It could crash through the door and drag me into the street whenever it chooses.” She stopped abruptly, for an odd, confused violence tangled her thoughts. She wanted to make sounds she had never heard from herself before. You killed me for a bird! she wanted to shout. A father is nothing but a foolish old man! Then she thought more calmly, But I always knew that. She stood up, gently pried his fingers from her skirt. “I’ll go now. Perhaps I can make a bargain with this lion. If it’s a lark it wants, I’ll sing to it. Perhaps I can go and come home so quickly my sisters will not even know.”

  “They will never forgive me.”

  “Of course they will.” She stepped over the crushed cage, started down the path without looking back. “I have.”

  But the sun had begun to set before she found the castle deep in the forest beyond the city. Even Pearl, gaily proffering tea cakes, must notice an insufficiency of Lark, and down in the pantry, Columbine would be whispering of the strange, bloody smear she had to clean off the porch… The stone lion, of pale marble, snarling a warning on its pedestal, seemed to leap into her sight between the dark trees. To her horror, she saw behind it a long line of stone lions, one at each broad step leading up to the massive, barred doors of the castle.

  “Oh,” she breathed, cold with terror, and the first lion turned its ponderous head. A final ray of sunlight gilded its eye. It stared at her until the light faded.

  She heard it whisper, “Who are you?”

  “I am the lark,” she said tremulously, “my father sent to replace the one he stole.”

  “Can you sing?”

  She sang, blind and trembling, while the dark wood rustled around her, grew close. A hand slid over her mouth, a voice spoke into her ear. “Not very well, it seems.”

  She felt rough stubbled skin against her cheek, arms tense with muscle; the voice, husky and pleasant, murmured against her hair. She turned, amazed, alarmed for different reasons. “Not when I am so frightened,” she said to the shadowy face above hers. “I expected to be eaten.”

  She saw a sudden glint of teeth. “If you wish.”

  “I would rather not be.”

  “Then I will leave that open to negotiation. You are very brave. And very honest to come here. I expected your father to send along the family cat or some little yapping powder puff of a dog.”

  “Why did you terrify him so?”

  “He took my lark. Being stone by day, I have so few pleasures.”

  “Are you bewitched?”

  He nodded at the castle. Candles and torches appeared on steps now. A row of men stood where the lions had been, waiting, while a line of pages carrying light trooped down the steps to guide them. “That is my castle. I have been under a spell so long I scarcely remember why. My memory has been turning to stone for some time, now… I am only human at night, and sunlight is dangerous to me.” He touched her cheek with his hand; unused to being touched, she started. Then, unused to being touched, she took a step toward him. He was tall and lean, and if the mingling of fire and moonlight did not lie, his face was neither foolish nor cruel. He was unlike her sisters’ suitors; there was a certain sadness in his voice, and hesitancy and humor that made her want to hear him speak. He did not touch her again when she drew closer, but she heard the pleased smile in his voice. “Will you have supper with me?” he asked. “And tell me the story of your life?”

  “It has no story yet.”

  “You are here. There is a story in that.” He took her hand then and drew it under his arm. He led her past the pages and the armed men, up the stairs to the open doors. His face, she found, was quite easy to look at. He had tawny hair and eyes, and rough, strong, graceful features that were young in expression and happier than their experience.

  “Tell me your name,” he asked, as she crossed his threshold.

  “Lark,” she answered, and he laughed.

  His name, she discovered over asparagus soup, was Perrin. Over salmon and partridge and salad, she discovered that he was gentle and courteous to his servants, had an ear for his musicians’ playing, and had lean, strong hands that moved easily among the jeweled goblets and gold-rimmed plates. Over port and nuts, she discovered that his hands, choosing walnuts and enclosing them to crack them, made her mouth go dry and her heart beat. When he opened her palm to put a nut into it, she felt something melt through her from throat to thigh, and for the first time in her life she wished she were beautiful. Over candlelight, as he led her to her room, she saw herself in his eyes. In his bed, astonished, she thought she discovered how simple life was.

  And so they were married, under moonlight, by a priest who was bewitched by day and pontifical by night. Lark slept until dusk and sang until morning. She was, she wrote her sisters and her father, entirely happy. Divinely happy. No one could believe how happy. When wistful questions rose to the surface of her mind, she pushed them under again ruthlessly. Still they came—words bubbling up—stubborn, half-coherent: Who cast this spell and is my love still in danger? How long can I so blissfully ignore the fact that by day I am married to a stone, and by night to a man who cannot bear the touch of sunlight? Should we not do something to break the spell? Why is even the priest, who preaches endlessly about the light of grace, content to live only in the dark? “We are used to it,” Perrin said lightly, when she ventured these questions, and then he made her laugh, in the ways he had, so that she forgot to ask if living in the dark, and in a paradox, was something men inherently found more comfortable than women.

  One day she received letters from both sisters saying that they were to be married in the same ceremony, and she must come, she could not refuse them, they absolutely refused to be married without her; and if their bridegrooms cast themselves disconsolately into a dozen millponds, or hung themselves from a hundred pear trees, not even that would move them to marry without her presence.

  “I see I must go,” she said with delight. She flung her arms around Perrin’s neck. “Please come,” she pleaded. “1 don’t want to leave you. Not for a night, nor for a single hour. You’ll like my sisters—they’re funny and foolish, and wiser, in their ways, than I am.”

  “I cannot,” he whispered, loath to refuse her anything.

  “Please.”

&
nbsp; “I dare not.”

  “Please.”

  “If I am touched by light as fine as thread, you will not see me again for seven years except in the shape of a dove.”

  “Seven years,” she said numbly, terrified. Then she thought of lovely, clumsy Pearl and her burnt tea cakes, and of Diamond and her puzzles and earnest discourses on the similarities between the moon and a dragon’s egg. She pushed her face against Perrin, torn between her various loves, gripping him in anguish. “Please,” she begged. “I must see them. But I cannot leave you. But I must go to them. I promise: no light will find you, my night-love. No light, ever.”

  So her father sealed a room in his house so completely that by day it was dark as night, and by night as dark as death. By chance, or perhaps because, deep in the most secret regions of his mind he thought to free Lark from her strange, enchanted husband and bring her back to light and into his life, he used a piece of unseasoned wood to make a shutter. While Lark busied herself hanging pearls on Pearl, diamonds on Diamond, and swathing them both in yards of lace, Sun opened a hair-fine crack in the green wood where Perrin waited.

  The wedding was a sumptuous, decadent affair. Both brides were dressed in cloth of gold, and they carried huge languorous bouquets of calla lilies. So many lilies and white irises and white roses crowded the sides of the church that, in their windows and on their pedestals, the faces of the saints were hidden. Even the sun, which had so easily found Perrin in his darkness, had trouble finding its way into the church. But the guests, holding fat candles of beeswax, lit the church with stars instead. The bridegrooms wore suits of white and midnight blue; one wore pearl buttons and studs and buckles, the other diamonds. To Lark they looked very much alike, both tall and handsome, tweaking their mustaches straight, and dutifully assuming a serious expression as they listened to the priest, while their eyes said: at last, at last, I have waited so long, the trap is closing, the night is coming… But their faces were at once so vain and tender and foolish that Lark’s heart warmed to them. They did not seem to realize that one had been an ingredient in Pearl’s recipes that she had stirred into her life, and the other a three-letter solution in Diamond’s crossword puzzle. At the end of the ceremony, when the bridegrooms had searched through cascades of heavy lace to kiss their brides’ faces, the guests blew out their candles.

  In the sudden darkness a single hair-fine thread of light shone between two rose petals.

  Lark dropped her candle. Panicked without knowing why, she stumbled through the church, out into light, where she forced a carriage driver to gallop madly through the streets of the city to her father’s house. Not daring to let light through Perrin’s door, she pounded on it.

  She heard a gentle, mournful word she did not understand.

  She pounded again. Again the sad voice spoke a single word.

  The third time she pounded, she recognized the voice.

  She flung open the door. A white dove sitting in a hair-fine thread of light fluttered into the air, and flew out the door.

  “Oh, my love,” she whispered, stunned. She felt something warm on her cheek that was not a tear, and touched it: a drop of blood. A small white feather floated out of the air, caught on the lace above her heart. “Oh,” she said again, too grieved for tears, staring into the empty room, her empty life, and then down the empty hall, her empty future.

  “Oh, why,” she cried, wild with sorrow, “have I chosen to love a lion, a dove, an enchantment, instead of a fond foolish man with waxed mustaches whom nothing, neither light nor dark, can ever change? Someone who could never be snatched away by magic? Oh, my sweet dove, will I ever see you? How will I find you?”

  Sunlight glittered at the end of the hall in a bright and ominous jewel. She went toward it thoughtlessly, trembling, barely able to walk. A drop of blood had fallen on the floor, and into the blood, a small white feather.

  She heard Perrin’s voice, as in a dream: Seven years. Beyond the open window on the flagstones another crimson jewel gleamed. Another feather fluttered, caught in it. On the garden wall she saw the dove turn to look at her.

  Seven years.

  This, its eyes said. Or your father’s house, where you are loved, and where there is no mystery in day or night. Stay. Or follow.

  Seven years.

  By the end of the second year, she had learned to speak to animals and understand the mute, fleeting language of the butterflies. By the end of the third year, she had walked everywhere in the world. She had made herself a gown of soft white feathers stained with blood that grew longer and longer as she followed the dove. By the end of the fifth year, her face had grown familiar to the stars, and the moon kept its eye on her. By the end of the sixth year, the gown of feathers and her hair swept behind her, mingling light and dark, and she had become, to the world’s eye, a figure of mystery and enchantment. In her own eyes she was simply Lark, who loved Perrin; all the enchantment lay in him.

  At the end of the seventh year she lost him.

  The jeweled path of blood, the moon-white feathers stopped. It left her stranded, bewildered, on a mountainside in some lonely part of the world. In disbelief, she searched frantically: stones, tree boughs, earth. Nothing told her which direction to go. One direction was as likely as another, and all, to her despairing heart, went nowhere. She threw herself on the ground finally and wept for the first time since her father had killed the lark.

  “So close,” she cried, pounding the earth in fury and sorrow. “So close—another step, another drop of blood—Oh, but perhaps he is dead, my Perrin, after losing so much blood to show me the way. So many years, so much blood, so much silence, so much, too much, too much…” She fell silent finally, dazed and exhausted with grief. The wind whispered to her, comforting; the trees sighed for her, weeping leaves that caressed her face. Birds spoke.

  Maybe the dove is not dead, they said. We saw none of ours fall dying from the sky. Enchantments do not die, they are transformed… Light sees everything. Ask the sun. Who knows him better than the sun who changed him into a dove?

  “Do you know?” she whispered to the sun, and for an instant saw its face among the clouds.

  No, it said in words of fire, and with fire, shaped something out of itself. It is you I have watched, for seven years, as constant and faithful to your love as I am to the world. Take this. Open it when your need is greatest.

  She felt warm light in her hand. The light hardened into a tiny box with jeweled hinges and the sun’s face on its lid. She turned her face away disconsolately; a box was not a bird. But she held it, and it kept her warm through dusk and nightfall as she lay unmoving on the cold ground.

  She asked the full moon when it rose above the mountain. “Have you seen my white dove? For seven years you showed me each drop of blood, each white feather, even on the darkest night.”

  It was you I watched, the moon said. More constant than the moon on the darkest night, for I hid then, and you never faltered in your journey. I have not seen your dove.

  “Do you know,” she whispered to the wind, and heard it question its four messengers, who blew everywhere in the world. No, they said, and No, and No. And then the sweet South Wind blew against her cheek, smelling of roses and warm seas and endless summers. Yes.

  She lifted her face from the ground. Twigs and dirt clung to her. Her long hair was full of leaves and spiders and the grandchildren of spiders. Full of webs, it looked as filmy as a bridal veil. Her face was moon pale; moonlight could have traced the bones through it. Her eyes were fiery with tears.

  “My dove.”

  He has become a lion again. The seven years are over. But the dove changed shape under the eyes of an enchanted dragon, and when the dragon saw lion, battle sparked. He is still fighting.

  Lark sat up. “Where?”

  In a distant land, beside a southern sea. I brought you a nut from one of the trees there. It is no ordinary nut. Now listen. Thus is what you must do…

  So she followed the South Wind to the land besi
de the southern sea, where the sky flashed red with dragon fire, and its fierce roars blew down trees and tore the sails from every passing ship. The lion, no longer stone by daylight, was golden and as flecked with blood as Lark’s gown of feathers. Lark never questioned the wind’s advice, for she was desperate beyond the advice of mortals. She went to the seashore and found reeds broken in the battle, each singing a different, haunting note through its hollow throat. She counted. She picked the eleventh reed and waited. When the dragon bent low, curling around itself to roar rage and fire at the lion gnawing at its wing, she ran forward quickly, struck its throat with the reed.

  Smoke hissed from its scales, as if the reed had seared it. It tried to roar; no sound came out, no fire. Its great neck sagged; scales darkened with blood and smoke. One eye closed. The lion leaped for its throat.

  There was a flash, as if the sun had struck the earth. Lark crouched, covering her face. The world was suddenly very quiet. She heard bullfrogs among the reeds, the warm, slow waves fanning across the sand. She opened her eyes.

  The dragon had fallen on its back, with the lion sprawled on top of it. A woman lay on her back, with Perrin on top of her. His eyes were closed, his face bloody; he drew deep, ragged breaths, one hand clutching the woman’s shoulder, his open mouth against her neck. The woman’s weary face, upturned to the sky above Perrin’s shoulder, was also bloodstained; her free hand lifted weakly, fell again across Perrin’s back. Her hair was as gold as the sun’s little box; her face as pale and perfect as the moon’s face. Lark stared. The waves grew full again, spilled with a languorous sigh across the sand. The woman drew a deep breath. Her eyes flickered open; they were as blue as the sky.

  She turned her head, looked at Perrin. She lifted her hand from his back, touched her eyes delicately, her brows rising in silent question. Then she looked again at the blood on his face.

  She stiffened, began pushing at him and talking at the same time. “I remember. I remember now. You were that monstrous lion that kept nipping at my wings.” Her voice was low and sweet, amused as she tugged at Perrin. “You must get up. What if someone should see us? Oh, dear. You must be hurt.” She shifted out from under him, made a hasty adjustment to her bodice, and caught sight of Lark. “Oh, my dear,” she cried, “it’s not what you think.”