Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He nodded. “I’ll help,” he offered. “These streets will run with blood, soon, if we don’t untangle this. What can I do?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Come with me. Talk to Lord Capulet, while I question Juliet’s mother and her nurse. Women know things, sometimes, that men never see under their noses.” I caught a whiff of myself then, having picked up the brawlers’ perfume. “After I wash,” I added ruefully, and we went together into the alehouse.

  Both women, I was told at the Capulets’ palace, were prostrate with grief. But I waited, and they roused themselves to speak with me, to shape their horror into words, and to make sure I knew who must be to blame. They came together, the Lady Capulet with her fine face seamed with lines, her hair unbound, a new web of silver glittering over the dark, her eyes red-rimmed, sometimes dry with fury, then spilling sorrow at a memory.

  “That Romeo,” she said between her teeth. “I should have sent poison to him in Mantua. I threatened to, because he killed our Tybalt. Juliet heard me—she said she would mix it for me.” She told me this fiercely, without shame, without thinking. I did the thinking then. Poison might have killed Romeo in the vault and never left a mark on him.

  “Did you?” I asked her, since she brought it up. She stared at me. Her face crumpled then; she turned away, shaking her head.

  “I wish I had,” she whispered, weeping. “I wish I had.”

  I looked at the nurse, wondering if she, too, had considered poison. She was plump, doughy, pale as tallow; her eyes, fidgety as magpie’s eyes, refused to meet mine. They spent much of their time hidden in a scrap of linen.

  “Oh, sir,” she wept. “Our treasure is dead, our precious duckling; all we had is so cruelly gone.”

  “Yes,” I said, as gently as I could. “But how? How did you manage, as much as you all loved her, to put her in the vault alive?”

  “She was dead!” the nurse cried out. “That morning she was to have married Paris—we found her dead in her bed! The pretty thing, with no more breath in her than a stone has, and no more life. So her wedding became her funeral.”

  “But she wasn’t dead.”

  Her mother, sobbing into her skirts, turned to me again. “He killed her—that fiend Montague.”

  “That may be, but for him to kill her, she would have to be buried alive.”

  “You keep harping on that,” she exclaimed angrily, while the nurse’s sobs got louder and louder. “How could you think we would have done such a thing?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I answered, bracing myself stolidly in the full force of their gale. “A young woman about to be married dies mysteriously in her bed, and her bridegroom to be meets his death in her tomb.” I could hardly hear my own voice over the nurse’s noise. Something was amiss. “Perhaps she tried to poison herself?” I suggested at random, since the word was in the air around us. “She did not wish to be married?”

  “She did!” the nurse cried out.

  “She didn’t,” the Lady Capulet said at the same time. They looked at one another. The nurse resumed sobbing. “She didn’t and then she did,” Lady Capulet amended.

  “She didn’t at first?”

  “I think she fretted—imagined things—the way girls will.”

  “The marriage bed,” I guessed. The nurse had soaked her linen and begun on her apron.

  “But she came to peace with the idea,” Lady Capulet said.

  “So she would not have poisoned herself, that morning, to avoid her marriage. Tried, and failed, I mean. And wakened later in the—”

  They were both crying at me by then. It took me a moment to untangle their words, and then their meanings. “Married” they both said, and “marriage” but it wasn’t until they finally met each other’s eyes again, that we all realized the words they spoke meant wildly different things.

  “My poor pet,” the nurse was sobbing. Lady Capulet groped for a chair. I could have used one, too.

  “What are you saying, Nurse.” I half expected Lady Capulet’s voice, rasping harshly through her throat, to flame like a dragon’s.

  “She had no fear, my poor, proud duck, of marriage—she was no maid. She was a married lady when she died.”

  “Married.” Lady Capulet had to stop to swallow. The nurse had hidden her face, trying to crawl into her apron, away, I sensed, from an impending explosion.

  “To whom?” I asked quickly, before Lady Capulet found her breath again and scorched the nurse to cinders.

  “Who else?” the nurse demanded of her apron. “Of course, to Romeo.”

  I tried to describe the ensuing chaos to my beloved, the next morning, but I did it badly. It made her laugh: the appalled and furious parents, the distraught nurse, the fury slowly giving way to bewilderment and then fresh tears as they realized what their daughter had done and why.

  “She loved him,” I said. “That much. And he loved her. Enough for both to defy their Houses. They had some notion, the nurse said, that the marriage might bring peace between their families.”

  She had stopped laughing at the image of the Lord Capulet chasing the nurse around the room, brandishing a silver branch of candles, while Antonio and I stumbled over chairs trying to catch him. She was silent a moment, dropping kisses like soft petals down my chest until I could no longer think, and reached for her, and she lifted her head, and said abruptly, “But it only answers a single question: Romeo did not kill Juliet. How did he die? How did she? Did she kill herself with his knife? Why? He came to her alive—She was still alive—”

  “The nurse kept saying the friar’s name—Friar Laurence, who married them in secret barely hours before Romeo killed Tybalt. But the friar has gone to Mantua.” I stirred, puzzled by an echo. Coincidence.

  “Why Mantua?” she asked, hearing the echo.

  “I don’t know… Romeo had been exiled to Mantua, but…”

  But what she did then made me forget time and light and duty, until I stood in the streets again, smiling at nothing. Then time dragged at me, and light roared, and duty called, and I went home to sleep an hour or two before I faced them all again.

  I met Antonio at noon, in the tavern where I had my breakfast. He sat with me, and gave me his news, which was little enough, after the previous day.

  “I spoke to Lord Montague’s nephew, Benvolio, who was Romeo’s good friend,” he said. “He knew nothing of any marriage. He was stunned by it. He thought Romeo was still brooding over some Rosaline. Walking the fields at night and babbling of love to the moon. It happened fast, his marriage to Juliet.”

  “Love does, when you’re young.”

  “One advantage of age: It’s a relief to be done with such stuff.”

  I looked at him, startled. “Surely you love. Your wife—”

  “If I loved my wife,” he said roundly, “I would be walking in Romeo’s mooncalf paths. Love’s as dangerous when you’re older.”

  “Then what would you call it? What you feel—” I stopped to settle a crumb in my throat. “For one another.”

  “Use,” he said comfortably. “Habit. Familiarity. She won’t leave me, though she has her faults and I have mine. She’s beautiful, and I let her have what she wants. If she is sometimes restless, that’s as it pleases her. She gives herself to me when I want, and she does so smiling. I don’t ask about other things that catch her eye, and she doesn’t tell. They don’t matter.”

  “But—”

  “We are content.” He swallowed the last of his ale. “What should I do now?”

  He was asking, I realized dimly, about our mystery. I was silent, remembering the open vault, the dead.

  “Paris,” I said finally. “It was his page who called the watch. Find the page and ask him what he knows.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Break the news to Lord Montague,” I said, rising, “of his son’s unexpected marriage. Meet me here before my watch begins.”

  Lord Montague’s palace seemed quiet, numbed with grief. He had lost both wife and son
within days of one another: Lady Montague had died brokenhearted over Romeo’s exile from Verona. Lord Montague, a tall, imposing man with hair whiter than I remembered, greeted me listlessly. He had been told, he said, of the marriage.

  “By whom?” I asked.

  His mouth tightened a little, eased. He sighed. “By my great enemies, the Capulets. We are left with very little to be angry about, and very much to grieve over. Our faults, especially. Our children might be alive, if we had—if we hadn’t—” He stopped, his mouth twitching, then added, “I have made offers of peace to Lord Capulet. Our children tried to love. It seems wrong to war over that.”

  I bowed my head, relieved. But there were still questions. “Did Romeo go alone to his exile?”

  He shook his head. “Balthasar went with him. His man. He was always faithful, very loyal to my son. Why?”

  “May I speak to him? He might have been there in the graveyard with Romeo. He might be able to tell us how Romeo died. And why.”

  “He died—” He stopped again. “He died of love.”

  So it seemed. I touched my brow, where too little sleep, too many riddles, were beginning to brawl behind my eyes. “I am very sorry, my lord. He was a kind young man, and gentle, unless he was provoked. And then from all accounts brave, and true to his friends.”

  “Balthasar knows little,” Lord Montague said, but sent a page for him. He added, while we waited, “My son was as good at killing as at loving. We taught him to do all things well. I suppose he killed Paris out of some kind of jealousy—”

  “It seems unlikely. More likely that Paris attacked him, thinking that Romeo had come to dishonor the dead, in revenge for his exile.”

  “What was Paris doing there?”

  “I’m not sure, yet. But he was young, in love. That’s when I would meet Romeo, wandering alone at night, sighing over Rosaline.”

  “Rosaline.” He snorted faintly, and then sighed himself. Better to have lived with a heart broken by Rosaline, than to have died for true love and Juliet.

  Or was it better? I wondered.

  Easier to think you love than to love.

  Easier to tell yourself lies than truth.

  “He took me with him to the graveyard, to help him open the vault, but he would not let me stay,” Balthasar told us when I asked. He seemed a modest young man, neat and well-spoken. Spidery lines ran across his brow; he blinked often, trying not to see, I guessed, not to remember. “He—he threatened me. That if I stayed, he would kill me.” He closed his eyes tightly, as if the light hurt them. “I didn’t believe him. But he wanted so badly for me to leave—How could I not do what he wanted?”

  “That’s all you saw? The open vault and Romeo entering? Where was Paris?”

  “I don’t know. I was running, by then. I never thought—never for a moment—I only thought he would take some comfort there, with her, and then leave. I thought—he had to see that she was dead, before he could live again.” He ground the heel of his hand into one eye a moment, while we watched. Then he added tonelessly, “He gave me a letter for you, my lord.”

  “What?” we both demanded.

  “I forgot about it. I think I lost it when I ran.”

  “What did it say? In heaven’s name, boy—”

  “I don’t know, my lord,” he answered wearily. “I never learned to read. I didn’t know it might be important. I never use letters. He wrote it just before we left Mantua for Verona.” He lifted his sad, winking eyes, to Lord Montague’s face. “I expected that he would be alive to tell you.”

  I went to the friar’s cell again, to see if he had returned, but there was no sign of him, no word, the sacristan said. My steps led me through the graveyard then, back to the vault; I was seized with some vague, nightmarish notion that the dead had wakened again, and I would find the vault gaping open to show fresh horrors, more dead dead again, more mysteries. But it was closed, silent. Trees murmured around me in a hot summer breeze; doves cooed their sad, comforting song. I walked around the vault, searching the long grass, the bushes, looking for something. Anything. What I found was a crowbar one of them had dropped, which only perplexed me more. What had Romeo expected to find if he had brought it to open the vault? A living Juliet? A shiver ran through me, even as I sweated. Was that what they had planned? That she should pretend to die, and he would come into her grave to rescue her? But why did he die, then? Had he not found her alive? She had been alive enough to kill herself at least and fall over his lifeless body.

  She had found him dead, then. And killed herself.

  But how had he died? And why?

  A beggar accosted me as I left the graveyard. A stranger to Verona, I thought; I did not recognize his face. He tried to speak to me, after I tossed him a coin, but I didn’t listen; I couldn’t hear him over the clamoring mystery in my brain. I went home again, to sleep a while before my watch. I woke at dusk, thickheaded and unrefreshed, still with nothing answered. I had hoped to shape my dreams into solutions, but all I dreamed was what I had seen: Juliet’s face, lovely as a flower and ghostly pale, her blood seeping into Romeo’s clothing; Paris lying against the wall, trying to coil himself around his wound; Romeo’s staring eyes, his parted lips, as if in the end he had seen Juliet alive and tried to speak; great, waxen trumpets of lilies scattered everywhere.

  As I ate my meal at dusk in the tavern, Antonio told me where the lilies had come from.

  “Paris brought them, his page said.” I nodded, unsurprised. “He told his page to keep watch, and whistle if he heard anyone coming.”

  “Did he bring a crowbar as well as flowers?” I asked.

  “No. Why? Was there one?” He answered himself. “There would have to be.”

  “Then Romeo opened the vault himself. So the page is watching, and Paris is—”

  “Strewing flowers in front of the vault and weeping—”

  “And what then? Someone comes?”

  “Romeo comes. They hide, Paris and his page, and watch Romeo order Balthasar away and open the vault. So Paris—”

  “Paris,” I said, illumined, “thinks Romeo has come to defile the place. Of course. So he leaps to defend Juliet, and they fight.”

  “With some reluctance, it seems, on Romeo’s part. The page said he spoke with a frantic courtesy, begging Paris to leave. But of course Paris would not. So he died there.”

  “And the page?”

  “He left when they began to fight, and ran to get the watch.”

  Me. I grunted and chewed a tasteless bite. I felt Antonio’s eyes on me, watching, unblinking. I wondered if he knew where my steps led me, at every dawn after my watch. I met his eyes finally, found them smiling faintly, enigmatic. Amused? I pushed my chair back noisily, finishing my meal as I rose.

  “What now?” he asked, intent as ever on the mystery. I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. If Friar Laurence does not return soon, I may have to ride to Mantua and look for him. I’ll speak to the Prince tomorrow, tell him what he hasn’t heard by now. But there are still those nagging questions. Did Juliet intend to kill herself on the morning of her marriage to Paris? Did Romeo come to the vault to mourn her death, or did he expect to find her alive? What killed him?”

  “Poison, likely. He came to die beside her in the vault.”

  “But why was she still alive?”

  He shook his head, baffled. “Star-crossed, maybe. They were never meant to live. Only to love.”

  He left me with that thought, as if the lovers had been more than human, nothing like us, who, older and growing tawdry with life, could no more have loved again than we could have cut new teeth. He went home to her; I went into the darkening streets.

  Another beggar stopped me, just before dawn; I could not see his face. Perhaps it was the same one. I could barely speak by then, with weariness; I only wanted to sleep. He tried to follow me, but I did not want him to see where I was going, and I spoke sharply to him. He faded away with the night. I dropped into my mistress’s arms, which s
he held out to me as generously as ever. I tried to bury myself in her sweetness as in some warm, gently moving sea, but my thoughts kept tossing me onto a rocky shore.

  “Do you love me?” I asked her once, without meaning to.

  “Of course,” she said. “Stephano. Of course.”

  The beggar was waiting for me when I left her.

  I stopped when I saw him, angry and mystified. Maybe he thought to threaten me by telling Antonio what he had seen; maybe he had some notion that Antonio might care. He had started to speak even before I stopped; busy studying him, I didn’t listen. He was tall and gaunt as some desert saint; his clothes hung loosely on him, where they weren’t holding themselves together by a thread. His hair and brows were shaggy, iron-grey and white. His feet were bare and dusty, cracked, as if he had walked parched roads for some time.

  He tried to fill my hand with gold, which is when I began to listen to him.

  “He told me to buy food with it, but I found I could not eat his gold. Not with what I gave him. He would not hear ‘no.’ I will pay your poverty, he said, not your will. I didn’t have the will to refuse. Refuse to eat, refuse to live. Until I heard what happened to him. I came to give back his gold. I can’t take back what I gave him, but I will not eat his death.”

  I closed my eyes, opened them, to see if he was still there, if his words made any better sense. “Who are you?” I asked, bewildered.

  “A poor apothecary, from Mantua. I wept when I heard. He spoke so courteously to me. He was so young, so bright and vibrant with life. I could not believe he would really want to die. A young woman would smile at him, I thought, and he would wonder how he could have ever thought of dying—”

  “Wait.” I held up my hand. “Wait.” My voice shook; I had to swallow what it was he told me. “You’re speaking of Romeo—”

  “I didn’t know his name,” he said. “Until we heard the news in Mantua, about the strange deaths in Verona. Then I knew it must be him.”