Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He bought poison from you. To kill himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s death—” My voice rose, broke away from me. “It’s death for you to tell me this—If I told them in Mantua what you sold—”

  “I know.” He peered at me, owl-like, from under his tufted brows, fearless, resigned. “I have done what I have done. And now you must.”

  I was silent, staring at him, piecing things together. Romeo must have heard of Juliet’s death and bought poison in Mantua to die beside her in that vault. I felt something push into my throat, some word, some noise. My eyes stung suddenly. They came alive for me, again: the two young lovers, wanting only time and room in the world to love. We had no time or room, in lives crowded with our empty passions, to give them.

  I leaned back against the stone wall of my mistress’s house, shaking, dry with sorrow, trying to hear some heartbeat in the stones. I heard only the clink of gold that was her laugh.

  “You must take it,” the apothecary said. I opened my eyes, stared down at the gold he had let fall into my hands. I moved finally, pushed myself away from the wall.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “What will you do with me?”

  “Feed you. What else? And after that you will leave this city, and I will never see your face again. Will I?”

  “Why?” he asked me softly, his bird-eyes, weary and unblinking, holding mine.

  “Because,” I sighed, “neither you nor I nor the stars themselves could have kept that young man alive without his Juliet.” I gave him back the gold. “Keep it. I would have to explain it otherwise. It is not from Romeo, but from me.”

  I walked him to the city gates, after we ate, to make sure that he did not linger. He seemed bewildered but not, on the whole, unhappy to be still alive. I had no desire to bring the issue up with the Prince. That Romeo took poison seemed obvious; he might have stolen it as easily as bought it. Juliet must have taken some herself, on her wedding morning. I had no idea where she had gotten that. Maybe, I thought, as I watched the apothecary become a shimmer of dust in the distance, we would never know.

  But when I went to the friar’s cell that morning, his garden gate was open, and so was his door. I walked in. His lean face was harried and wan with grief, but unsurprised, as if he expected me.

  “Stephano,” he said, and pulled me down beside him. “I have been—”

  “I know, in Mantua.”

  “No,” he said, exasperated. “In Verona. I was leaving for Mantua to tell young Romeo that Juliet would only pretend to die—the letter I wrote him had gone astray. But I wound up quarantined along with my traveling companion, Friar John, who had been visiting the sick. Plague, we were told, but it was only measles. They finally let me out this morning. Only to be stricken with this news…”

  “Friar Laurence, did you give Juliet the poison?”

  “It was only to make her pretend to die! So that she would not have to go through that farce of a wedding.” He pulled a dusty boot off and flung it across the room, then sat brooding at it a moment. “A foolish old man,” he breathed. “Who did I think I was, to meddle with love? Blame me for everything. Let me find my sandals. Then take me to the Prince—I’ll tell him—”

  “I think we’re all to blame,” I said softly, and sat on one of his uncomfortable stools. “And maybe it was their destiny to bring Verona peace. Friar, will you shrive me before we go?”

  His brows rose in surprise at my oddly timed request. But he only touched the crucifix on his breast and murmured, “Who will forgive me?”

  Voyage into the Heart

  The virgin they got from the cow barn, the Prince’s daughter being, as she put it, indisposed. She did look pale, the mage thought, her golden skin blanching the color of boiled almonds at the idea. She was to be married within the week; the mage was not without sympathy. Fortunately, the Prince had other things on his mind.

  “Just find one,” he said impatiently, assuming either that virgins grew on trees or that the word, spoken, would make itself true. “Anyone will do.”

  Any number of virgins appeared at the mage’s summons, all looking quiet, modest, beautifully dressed for the occasion. They became suffused with blushes at the mage’s questions. Lips trembled, eyes hid themselves, hands rose gracefully, silk shaken back from wrists, to touch quickly beating hearts or slender, blue-veined throats wound with chains of gold thinner than the tremulous veins. They saw themselves waiting at the edge of the forest, listening to the wild hoofbeats, the urgent clamor of horns, the courtiers in their rich leathers and furs riding hard, sweating, shouting, slowly closing around the elusive beast, driving it towards its heart’s desire. For her only would it stop; to her only would it meekly yield its power and its beauty, while all around her men fell silent, watching the single moon-white horn descend, the liquid eye close, the proud head fall to rest across her thighs.

  “Yena,” the mage said at one face, startled out of his boredom. “What are you doing here?”

  There was no smile in her sapphire eyes, nothing that had been there for him in the dark, scant hours before. She answered solemnly, “My heart is still virginal, my lord Ur. I have not lost my innocence; I have only gained a certain knowledge.”

  What she said was true; he felt it. But he answered grimly, “You stand to lose more than your innocence.” He pitched his voice to be heard, subtly, even by those daydreaming outside the corridor. “The Prince wants that horn to detect poison at his daughter’s wedding feast. Despite treaties, he still fears betrayal from old enemies. The betrothal is devoid of romance and so is this hunt. The animal will run from you. I don’t know what the Prince will do, but he will not thank you.”

  He saw her swallow. He heard whisperings through the stone walls, footsteps muffled in supple leather and silk trying to walk on air away from him.

  Then he heard rough voices, a woman’s pithy curse. The doorway cleared abruptly at a whiff of barn. A young woman with astonishing eyes, so light and clear they seemed faceted like jewels, hovered in the doorway. A stabler prodded her forward, pushed himself in behind her.

  “My daughter, my lord. She doesn’t like men.”

  The mage gazed at her, received only annoyance and some fear from her haunting eyes. They made him turn inward, look at his own past to see what she was seeing in him.

  “Well,” he wondered, “why should she?”

  She didn’t seem to know what they wanted of her, why they insisted on washing her, dressing her in silks, making her sit under a tree, just beyond the forest’s edge. “A what?” she kept saying. “Is that all you want me to do? Just sit? What about that lot? Did you see those eyes? Like bulging eggs in a pan, chestnuts in a fire. I’m warning, if they touch me, I’ll feed their livers to the pigs.”

  “No one,” said the mage’s disembodied voice somewhere up the tree, “will hurt you.”

  She cast a glance like white flame up at him. Not even his spell, he felt suddenly, could withstand that vision. But she said, rising, “Where are you? I can’t see you. Can’t I be up there with you? They’ll run me down, they; with their brains in their breeches and scrambled from bouncing in their saddles—”

  “Hush,” the mage breathed, weaving the word into the sound of his voice, so that the leaves hushed around him, and the air. His spell did not touch her—the animal might scent it—but the stillness he had created did. She settled herself again, her arms around her knees. A tangle of horns, trumpets, shouts, preceded the hunt. Her face turned toward the sounds, her hands tightening. But she stayed still, biting her lower lip with nervousness. Her lips were full, the mage noted, though she was scrawny enough. Washed and brushed, her dark hair revealed shades of fire, even gold. The fanfares sounded again, closer now. She looked up fretfully, trying to find him.

  “This is all—”

  “It won’t hurt you,” he promised. “I’ll let nothing hurt you. It will come to you as docilely as a cat. A child.”

  She snorted, shif
ting restlessly. “Maybe they come that way to you, cats and barn brats. Then what? Then what after I just sit and let it come?”

  “Nothing. You go back.”

  “That’s all.”

  “All,” he said, and then he saw the animal running through the shadows within the wood.

  It made no sound. It saw him in the tree; its night-dark eyes found him, pinned him motionless on the branch. It did not fear him. Transfixed, he realized that it feared nothing, not the dogs at its heels, nor the noise, the arrows flicking futilely in its wake, the bellowing men. Nothing. It was ancient, moon-white, and so wild nothing could ever threaten it; nothing else existed with such fierceness, such power, nothing that could die. It was an element, the mage saw, like air or fire. Stunned, he became visible and did not know it. Below him, the woman sat as motionlessly, no longer fretful, watching it come at her. The mage could not hear her breathe. As it grew close she made a sound, a small sound such as a child might make, too full of wonder to find a word for it.

  She lifted her hands. The star burning toward her stopped. Something rippled through it: a scent, a recognition. Its horn spiraled like a shell to a fine and dangerous point. It moved toward her, step by cautious step, as if it felt she might run. Behind it, almost soundlessly, the hunters ranged themselves along the trees, waiting. Even the dogs were silent.

  It dropped its head into her hands. Awkwardly, she stroked its pelt, making that sound again, as impossible or unexpected textures melted through the scars and calluses on her hands. It began to kneel to her. The mage felt his throat burn suddenly, his eyes sting with wonder, as they had not for centuries, over something as simple as this: All the tales of it were true.

  It laid its head across her lap. She stroked it one more time. Then she looked up toward the mage, found him, tried to smile at him in excitement and astonishment, while tears glittered down her face, caught between her lips. Her eyes held him, held all his attention. They contained, he realized, the same innocent, burning power he had glimpsed in the great beast that had come to rest beneath her hands. Amazed again, he thought: Like calls to like.

  And then a blade severed the horn from the head with a single cut. A second drove into the animal’s heart.

  The mage fell out of the tree. He vanished, falling, then reappeared on his feet as the hunters made way for the Prince, and the woman, screaming, stared at the bleeding head on her knees. The mage, groping for words, found nothing, nothing where anything should be, no word for this: It had never happened before. The Prince laid a hand on his shoulder, laughing, and said something. Then the woman screamed again and flung herself catlike off the ground at the mage.

  “You saw—” She still wept, though now her teeth were clenched with grief, her face twisted with horror and fury. “You saw—Your face said everything you saw! But you let them—How could you let them? How could you?” She struck him suddenly, and again, fierce, openhanded blows that gave him, for the first time in centuries, the taste of his own blood.

  And then she was quiet, lying across the animal, her face against its face, her arm hung across its neck, as if she still grieved, but silently now, so silently that she cast her spell over all the men. They stared down at her, motionless. Finally, one of them cleared his throat and sheathed his bloody sword. The Prince said, “Take the animal; the hooves might be useful. What do you think, Ur? Are there magical properties in the hooves?”

  The mage, beginning to tremble, felt the spiraled horn split his brow, root itself in his thoughts.

  “Ur?” the Prince said, from very far away. “Should we bother with the hooves? Ur.”

  Then there was silence again, as spellbound bone and sinew strained against their familiar shape; the men around the mage grew shadowy, insignificant. Words escaped him, memories, finally even his name. Her eyes opened in his heart to haunt him with their power and innocence and wonder, all he remembered of being human. Seeking her, he fled from the world he knew into the beginning of the tale.

  Toad

  The first thing that leaps to the eye is that my beloved had no manners. She behaved like a spoiled brat once she had what she wanted. If it had not been for her father, where would I have been? Still hanging around the well, instead of dressed in silks and wearing a crown, and being bowed and scraped to, not to mention diving in and out of the dark, moist cave of our marriage sheets, cresting waves of satin like seals, barking and tossing figs to one another, then diving back down, bearing soft, plump fruit in our mouths. “Old waddler,” she called me at first, with a degree of accuracy missing from subsequent complaints. She never could tell a frog from a toad.

  Why, you might wonder, would any self-respecting toad, having been slammed against a wall by a furious brat of a princess, want, upon regaining his own shape, to marry her? Not only was she devious, promising me things and then ignoring her promises when threatened by the cold proximity of toad, she was bad-tempered to boot. The story that has come down doesn’t make a lot of sense here: why are lies and temper rewarded with the handsome prince? She didn’t want to let me into the castle, she didn’t want to feed me, she didn’t want to touch me; above all she didn’t want me in her bed. When I pleaded with her to show mercy, to become again that sweet, weeping, charming child beside the well who promised me everything I asked for, she picked me up as if I were the golden ball that I had rescued for her and bounced me off the stones. If she had missed the wall and I had gone flying out a window, what might have happened? Would I have waddled away, muttering and limping, under the moonlight, to slide back into the well until fate tossed another golden ball my way?

  Maybe.

  She’ll never know.

  Her father comes out well in the stories. A man of honor, harassed by his exasperating daughter, who tries to wheedle and whine her way out of her promises. A king, who would consent to eat with a toad at his table, for no other reason than to make his daughter keep her word. “Papa, please, no,” she begged, her gray eyes awash with tears, the way I had first seen her, her curly hair, golden as her ball, tumbling out of its pins to her shoulders. “Papa, please don’t make me let it in. Don’t make me share my food with it. Don’t make me touch it. I’ll die if I have to touch a frog.”

  “It’s a toad,” he said at one point, watching me drink wine out of her goblet. She had his gray eyes; he saw a bit more clearly than she, but not enough: only enough to use me as a lesson in his daughter’s life.

  “Frog, toad, what’s the difference? Papa, please don’t make me!”

  “Toads,” he said accurately, “are generally uglier than frogs. Most have nubby, bumpy skin—”

  “I’ll get warts, Papa!”

  “That’s a fairy tale. Look at its squat body, its short legs, made for insignificant hops, or even for walking, like a dog. Observe its drab coloring.” He added, warming to his subject while I finished his daughter’s dessert, “They have quite interesting breeding habits. Some lay eggs on land instead of water. Others give birth to tiny toads, already fully formed. Among midwife toads, the male carries the eggs with him until they hatch, moistening them in—”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  “I would like to be taken to bed now,” I said, wiping my mouth with her embroidered linen.

  “Papa!”

  “You promised,” I reminded her reproachfully. “I can’t get up the stairs; you’ll have to carry me. As your father pointed out, my limbs are short.”

  “Papa, please!”

  “You promised,” he said coldly: an honorable man. A lesson was to be learned simply at the expense of a stain of well water on her sheets, a certain clamminess in the atmosphere. What harm could possibly come to her?

  I have always thought that her instincts were quite sound. For one thing: consider her age. Young, beautiful, barely marriageable, she might have kissed—though contrary to common belief, not me—but she had most certainly never taken anyone to bed with her besides her nurse and her dolls. Who would want an ugly, dank and warty toad i
n her bed instead of what she must have had vague yearnings for? And after all that talk of breeding habits! Something bloated and insistent, moving formlessly under her sheets while she tried to sleep, something cold, damp, humorless—who could blame her for losing her temper?

  Then why did she make those promises?

  Because something in her heart, in her marrow, recognized me.

  Let’s begin with the child sitting beside the well, beneath the linden tree. She thinks she is alone, though her world, she knows, proceeds in familiar and satisfactory fashion within the elegant castle beyond the trees. The linden is in bloom; its creamy flowers drift down into her hair, drop and float upon the dark water. Breeze strokes her hair, her cheeks. She tosses her favorite plaything, her golden ball, absently toward the sky, enjoying the suppleness and grace of her body, the thin silk blowing against her skin. She wears her favorite dress, green as the heart-shaped linden leaves; it makes her feel like a leaf, blown lightly in the wind. She throws her ball, takes a breath of air made complex and intoxicating by scents from the tree, the gardens, the moist earth at the lip of the well. She catches her ball, throws it again, thinks of nothing. She misses the ball.

  It falls with a splash into the middle of the well, and, weighted with its tracery of gold, sinks out of sight. She has no idea how deep the water is, what snakes and silver eels might live in it, what long grasses might reach up to twine around her if she dares leap into it. She does what has always worked in her short life: she weeps.

  I appear.

  Her grief is genuine and quite moving; she might have dropped a child into the well instead of a ball. She scarcely sees me. I make little impression on her sorrow except as a means to end it. In her experience, help answers when she calls; her desperation transforms the world so that even toads can talk.

  All her attention is on the water when she hears my voice. She speaks impatiently, wiping her eyes with her silks, to see better into the rippling shadows. “Oh, it’s a frog. Old waddler, I dropped my ball in the water—I must have it back! I’ll die without it! I’ll give you anything if you get it for me—these pearls, my crown—anything! So will my papa.”