Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I understand.”

  “No, but really—tell her, Perrin.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Perrin said gently. “You were kind to me. That’s what Lark will remember.”

  But she remembered everything, as they flew on the griffin’s back across the sea: her father’s foolish bargain, the fearsome stone lion, the seven years when she followed a white dove beyond any human life, the battle between dragon and lion, and then the hopeless loss of him again. She turned the nut in her palm, and questions rose in her head: Can I truly stand more mysteries, the possibilities of more hardship, more enchanting princesses between us! Would it be better just to crack the nut and eat it! Then we would all fall into the sea, in this moment when our love is finally intact. He seems to live from spell to spell. Is it better to die now, before something worse can happen to him? How much can love stand?

  Perrin caught her eyes and smiled at her. She heard the griffin’s labored breathing, felt the weary catch in its mighty wings. She tossed the nut high into the air and watched it fall a long, long way before it hit the water. And then the great tree grew out of the sea, to the astonishment of passing sailors, who remembered it all their lives, and told their incredulous grandchildren of watching a griffin red as fire drop out of the blue to rest among its boughs.

  The Witches of Junket

  Granny Heather was out on the lawn digging up night crawlers by flashlight when she saw the black spot on the moon. She heard the tide, though the sea was twenty miles away, and she saw the massive rock just offshore south of Crane Harbor open vast black eyes and stare at her. Three huge birds flew soundlessly overhead, looking like pterodactyls, glowing bluish white, like ghosts might. She didn’t know if she was in the past or future. In the future, the sea might eat its way through the wrinkled old coast mountains, across the pastures where the sheep grazed, to her doorstep. In the past, those dinosaur birds might have flown over Junket, or whatever was there before the town was. She stopped tugging at a night crawler that was tugging itself back into its hole, and she turned the flashlight off. She made herself as small as possible, hunkering down on her old knees in the damp grass. Her hair felt too bright; she wondered if, under the moonlight, it glowed like the ghost birds. She heard her thin blood singing.

  “So,” she whispered, “you’re awake.”

  For a moment she felt stared at, as if the full moon were an eye. It could see into her frail bones, find the weakest places where a tap might shatter her. She felt luminous, exposed, her old bones shining like the bones of little fish down in the darkest realms of the sea.

  Then it was over, she was disregarded, the moon was no longer interested in her.

  She stood up in the dark, tottery, her heart hammering, and made her way back into her house.

  The next morning, she took her pole and her night crawlers and her lawn chair down the road to where the old pump house straddled a branch of the Junket River, where the bass liked to feed. She pleated a worm onto her hook and added an afterthought: a green marshmallow. No telling, she thought. She cast her line into the still water.

  A trout rose up out of the water, danced on its tail, and said, “Call Storm’s children.”

  It vanished back into the water as she stared, and took the worm clean off the hook, leaving the marshmallow.

  She reeled in, sighing. “It’s easy,” she grumbled to the trout, “for you to say. You don’t have to put up with them.”

  But she had to admit it was right.

  Still and all, Storm’s children being what they were, she got a second opinion.

  She drove her twenty-year-old red VW Beetle over to Poppy and Cass’s house, adding another 3.8 miles to the 32,528.9 she had turned over in twenty years. Cass was in the yard, polishing a great wheel of redwood burl. His work shed, which was a small warehouse left over from when the nearly invisible town of Raventree actually had a dock for river traffic, was cluttered with slabs of redwood and smaller, paler pieces of myrtle. He smiled at Heather, but he didn’t speak. He was a shy, untidy giant, with hair that needed pruning and a nicotine-stained mustache. He jerked his head at the house to tell Heather where Poppy was, and Heather, feeling damp in her bones, creaked to the door, stuck her head inside.

  “Poppy?”

  Poppy came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Why, Heather, you old sweet thing. I didn’t hear you drive up. Come on in and sit down. I’ll get us some tea.” Turning briskly back to the kitchen, she caused whirlwinds: plants moved their faces, table legs clattered, framed photos on the wall slid askew. Heather waited until things quieted, then eased into one of Cass’s burl chairs. It had three legs like a stool and a long skinny back with a face, elongated and shy, peering out of the wood gram. A teakettle howled; Poppy came back again carrying mugs of water with mint leaves floating in them. Heather preferred coffee, but she preferred nearly anything to Poppy’s coffee. Anyway, she liked chewing on mint leaves.

  Poppy settled into a chair with wide arms that had holes for plant pots; delicate strings-of-hearts hung their runners over the sides almost to the floor. Poppy was a tall, big-boned woman who wore her yellow-gray hair in a long braid over one shoulder. Her eyes were wide-set, smoky gray; her brows were still yellow in her smooth forehead. She favored eye-smacking colors and clunky jewelry. Abalone, turquoise, hematite, and coral danced on her fingers. She wore big myrtle wood loops in her ears; a chunk of amber on a chain bounced on her bosom. She was the age Storm would have been, if Storm hadn’t skidded into a tree on a rainy night. Heather had looked to Poppy after that, someone for her bewildered eyes to rest on after Storm had vanished, and Poppy had let her, coaxing her along as patiently as if Heather had been one of her ailing plants.

  Heather took a sip of tea and spent a moment working a mint leaf out from behind one tooth, while Poppy meandered amiably about her married daughter and her new grandson. “Chance, they named him,” she said. “Might as well have named him Luck or Fate or—Still and all, it’s kind of catching.”

  “Poppy,” Heather said, having finally swallowed the mint leaf, “I got to send for Storm’s children.”

  Poppy put her mug down on the chair arm. Her brows pinched together suddenly, as if a tooth had jabbed her. “Oh, no.”

  “I’ve been told to.”

  “Who told you?”

  “A trout, under Tim Greyson’s pump house.”

  “Well, why, for goodness sake?”

  Heather sighed, feeling too old and very frail. “You know what’s inside Oyster Rock.” Poppy gave a nod, silent. “Well, it’s not going to stay there.”

  Poppy swallowed. She stared at nothing a moment, her sandal tapping—she preferred the cork-soled variety, which lifted her up even taller and slapped her feet as she walked. “Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Are you sure? It’s been down there for eight hundred years, ever since that Klamath woman drove it back into the rock. You’d think it could have stayed there a few more years.”

  “You’d think so. But—”

  “Maybe we don’t have to send for Storm’s children. Maybe we could handle it ourselves. Still, Annie’s up north with her daughter and Tessa has to get her legs worked on, and Olivia’s at the mud caves in Montana, rejuvenating her skin—”

  “That leaves you and me,” Heather said dryly. “Unless you’re busy, too.”

  “Well—”

  “The point is, that thing’s not going to ask us if we have time for it. It’s not going to wait around for Annie to get home or Olivia to get the mud off her face. It’s coming out. I felt it, Poppy. I saw the warnings. None of us was around eight hundred years ago to know exactly what it does, so if a trout says get help, how’re you going to argue with it?”

  Poppy drew a breath, held it. “Did you catch the trout?” she asked grimly.

  “No.”

  “Pity. I’d like to deep-fry it.” She kicked moodily at the planter again; the ficus in it shivered and dropped a leaf. “Are you sure what’s inside the rock isn
’t the lesser of the two evils?”

  “Poppy! Those are my grandchildren you’re talking about. Besides,” she added, “they’re older now. Maybe they’ve settled down a little.”

  “Last time they came, they threw a keg party in the church parking lot.”

  “That was seven years ago, and, anyway, it was at Evan’s funeral,” Heather said stubbornly. She kicked at the planter herself, feeling the chill at her side where Evan wasn’t anymore. “And it was more like a wake. Even I had a sip of beer.”

  Poppy smiled, patting Heather’s hand soothingly, though her brows still tugged together. “Evan would have enjoyed the party,” she said. “It’s a wonder he didn’t shuffle back out of his grave.”

  “He always was an irreligious old poop. Poppy, I got to do it. I can’t ignore what I saw. I can’t ignore advice given by water.”

  “No.” Poppy sighed. “You can’t. But you can’t bring Storm’s children back here without explaining why, either. We’d better have a meeting. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with. Inside the rock, that is. It had another name, that rock, didn’t it? Some older name… Then people settling around Crane Harbor renamed it; the old name didn’t make any sense to them.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, of course it was years before even you were born—Mask. That’s what it was. Mask-in-the-Rock.”

  Heather felt her face wrinkle up, in weariness and perplexity. “Mask. They were right—it doesn’t make much sense.” Her legs tensed to work herself to her feet. But she didn’t move. She wanted to stay in Poppy’s house, where the chairs had shy faces and lived in a green forest hidden away from anything called Mask. “Things get old,” she said half to herself. “Maybe this Mask-thing got a little tired in eight hundred years.”

  “More likely,” Poppy said, “it had an eight-hundred-year nap.” The door opened; Cass came in, and her face changed quickly. She rose, smiling, flashing amber and mother of pearl, chattering amiably as she picked up Heather’s mug. “Heather and I are going to take a little ride, honey. Maybe do a little shopping, go watch some waves, have a bite to eat at Scudder’s. Is there anything you want me to pick up for you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cass said, smoothing his mustache. His hand, broad, solid, muscular, like something he might have carved out of wood, moved with deliberation from his mustache to Poppy’s purple shoulder. He smiled at her, seeing her a moment. Then his eyes filled up again with burls, boles, shapes embedded in wood grain. He gave her shoulder an absent pat. “Have fun.”

  “Fun,” Poppy said, grim again, as she fired up Heather’s VW and careened onto the two-lane road that ran along the Junket River into Crane Harbor. “Heather, I feel like I’m sitting in a tin can. Is this thing safe?”

  “I’ve had it for twenty years and I never even dinged it,” Heather said, clutching the elbow rest nervously. “You be careful with my car, Poppy McCarey. If you land us in the river—”

  “Oh, honey, this car would float like a frog egg.”

  “Maybe,” Heather said grumpily. “But you don’t got to go so fast—that thing’s been in there for eight hundred years.”

  The road hugged the low, pine-covered mountain on one side and gave them a view of the Junket Valley on the other, with the slow river winding through green fields, the sheep on them white as dandelion seed. Occasionally, they passed small herds of cows, which made Heather remember the old farm back in Nebraska, before the drought boiled the ground dry as a rusty pot.

  “There’s that Brahma bull,” she said as they rounded a curve. She liked looking at it, humpy and gray among the colored cows.

  “There’s llamas,” Poppy said, “over by Port James. Have you seen them?”

  “Over by the cranberry bogs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  Poppy weighed down on the gas suddenly to pass a pickup pulling a horse trailer, and Heather closed her eyes. She must have taken a little nap, with the sun flicking in and out of the trees, light and dark chasing each other over her face, for when she opened them again, they were passing the slough, and there were no more hills left in front of them. Then there was no more land left; they had come to the edge of the world. She put her window down to smell the sea.

  The air was chilly; the sea, its morning mist rolling away in a dark gray band across the horizon, looked turquoise. The tide heaved against the pilings along the harbor channel; foam exploded like bed ticking into the bright air.

  “Tide’s in.” Poppy turned away from the harbor onto a road that ambled along the cliffs and beaches toward Oyster Rock. Fishers stood at the edge of the tide, casting into the surf.

  “Bet the perch are biting now,” Heather said wistfully.

  Poppy, who hated to fish, said nothing. They passed the Sandpiper hotel, pulled into a viewpoint parking lot behind it. Poppy turned off the engine.

  They sat silently. From that angle on the cliff, they could see the grassy knoll on top of Oyster Rock, and the white-spattered ledges where the cormorants nested. The tide boiled around the rock, tried to crawl up it. Gulls circled it, like they circled trawlers and schools of fish, wheedling plaintively. To Heather, their cries seemed suddenly cries of alarm, of warning, at something they had felt stirring beneath their bird feet, inside the massive rock.

  “Looks quiet enough,” Poppy said after a while.

  “Maybe,” Heather said, feeling small again, cold. “But it doesn’t make me quiet in my bones. Always did before, always whenever we’d drive here to look at it—me and Evan, or me alone after Evan died—in the morning, in the moonlight. You watched the waves, curling around that old rock with the birds on its head, and you feel like as long as that rock stands there, so will the world. Now, it don’t feel that way. It just feels—hollow.”

  Poppy nodded, the myrtle loops rocking in her ears. “The cormorants have all gone,” she said suddenly, and Heather blinked. So they had. The dark shadows on the splotched wall where the birds had nested for years were nothing but that—splits in the rock, or maybe shadows of the birds that the birds had left behind, escaping. Poppy’s mouth tightened; her ringed hand fiddled nervously with amber. She reached out abruptly and started the engine.

  “We’ve got to make some phone calls.”

  “Where we going to meet?”

  “Your house, of course. Nobody but the cats there to listen in.”

  “You better get me home then. I got to dust.”

  Poppy spun to a halt in the gravel. She stared at Heather a second before she laughed. “Listen to you! I swear you wouldn’t go to your own funeral unless you cleaned out your refrigerator first.”

  “I probably won’t,” Heather retorted. “Now, between this and that and Storm’s children coming, I’ll never get my tomatoes planted.”

  “That’s another thing you have to do.”

  “What?”

  “Call Storm’s children.”

  “Oh, fiddle,” Heather said crossly. “Damn!”

  Sarah Ford came that night, and Tessa, walking with her canes, and Laura Field, who was even older than Heather, from the Victorian mansion across the street, and Dawn Singleton, who was only nineteen, and Rachel Coulter, who always found the thread on the carpet, the stain on the coffee cup, the dust on the whatnot shelf. Heather took oatmeal cookies out of the freezer and jars of Queen Anne cherries from her tree out of the pantry. Olivia Bogg was out of state, Vi Darnelle was down with the flu, and Annie Turner had gone to Portland to visit her daughter. But, considering the notice they’d been given, it was a good gathering, Heather thought. She watched Rachel turn a cookie over to examine a burned spot on it, and she wanted to take one of Tessa’s canes and smack Rachel in the shin. Rachel bit into the cookie dubiously; her heavy, frowning face quivered like custard. How Poppy, in an orange sweater, orange lipstick, tight jeans, high-heeled sandals, and what looked like half the dime store jewelry in Junket, managed to look remotely glamorous at her age was more than Heather could und
erstand.

  They finished their coffee and dessert and gossip; little pools of silence spread until they were all silent, curious faces turning toward Poppy, who was perched on the arm of the sofa, and toward Heather, who was gazing at an old oval black-and-white picture of Evan as a little boy, wearing a sailor suit and shoes that buckled like a girl’s. How, she wondered, always with the same astonishment, did he get from being that little long-haired boy to that old man in his grave? How does that happen?

  Then the cuckoo sprang out of its doorway nine times, and Heather blinked and saw the faces turned toward her, waiting.

  “Who called this meeting?” Tessa asked in her deep, strong voice.

  “I did,” Heather said.

  “For what reason?” Dawn Singleton’s young voice wavered a little out of nervousness; her black high-tops stirred the nap on Heather’s carpet.

  “I’ve been warned.”

  “By what?” old Laura Field asked, her voice as sweet and quavery as Dawn’s. Poppy almost hadn’t got her; she’d been on her way out the door to visit her husband, who had been in a coma at the Veterans Hospital in Slicum Bay for nine years.

  “By the moon. By birds. By water.”

  There was a short silence; even Rachel was looking a little bug-eyed. Then Rachel cleared her throat. “What warning was given?”

  “The thing inside Oyster Rock is coming out.”

  Even the cuckoo clock went silent then. It seemed a long slow moment from the movement of its pendulum back to the movement of its pendulum forth. Dawn’s high-tops crept together, sought comfort from each other. Poppy moved, fake clusters of diamonds sparkling in her ears. It was her turn to ask one question.

  “What must be done?”

  They came to life a little at her voice. Rachel blinked; Laura Field cleared her throat softly; Sarah Ford, her mouth still open, shifted her coffee cup.

  “I have been advised.”