The Dragon Queen

by Alice Borchardt

  I was right on target. The boar staggered and gave a grunting squall of pain, then staggered away, its back to me, shaking its head and giving almost human moans. I heard a cheer from Gray and Black Leg.

  “You got it. You got it.”

  The wind hit then, so hard it nearly dumped me out of the tree. The day had been warm, sunny, and bright; but this wind was cold, like an icy frost that precedes a storm. Above, the sky darkened. I saw that the mist in the distance had moved closer to shore and was drowning the light. As I watched, the boar went down, blood streaming from its nostrils and mouth.

  “It’s dying,” Gray said.

  But Black Leg was looking up at the sky. He made the sign of the cross, and I knew we were both afraid. This was no natural beast. I could not think it was dead, and I was right. It wasn’t.

  The wind blew hard again and the dust rose. And the boar was gone. A warrior stood where he had been. He was wearing only a skin tied at the waist with a thong. He was dead, and his head had been taken, but it had been sewn back on with coarse sinew. There was a hole in his chest where the sword went in. It, too, was sewn shut with sinew.

  He looked at me. “Will you come down, or shall I fetch you?” he asked.

  The mist glided in among the trees, and it seemed so dark now as to be late in the evening of a gloomy day. The air smelled wet.

  “I don’t think I could bear your hands on my body,” I said. “I will come down.”

  He turned toward Black Leg and Gray. “I have no orders about you. I don’t want you. Go.”

  “No!” they both shouted.

  “Yes,” I said. “Get Maeniel.”

  “I don’t know if even he can come here,” Black Leg said.

  “I’m betting he can,” I answered, “but he won’t unless you fetch him—go!”

  “Yes,” Gray said, and shoved Black Leg away. “I will bear my lady company. Do as she says, get Maeniel.”

  By now we were both on the ground. I climbed out of the tree, but when the dead man moved toward me, I eased back. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “I have some little power, and if you touch me, I will fight. I don’t know if I can hurt you, but I will try.”

  He was very big and dark. He wore the torc below the seam where his head had been sewn back on. He was the largest man I had ever seen, and I also saw he had a sword. He wore it slung on his back in the old-fashioned way. Even Gray looked small near him.

  Gray asked Black Leg, “Give me back my shirt.”

  Black Leg went wolf and ducked out of Gray’s shirt. He shook it out.

  “Don’t make flea jokes,” I said.

  Black Leg was still there, ears laid back, studying the warrior.

  “Trust me,” Gray said. “Flea jokes are the farthest thing from my mind.”

  “Kyra makes them and Maeniel ignores them, but Black Leg gets mad,” I explained.

  The dead man turned and extended his arm, pointed his finger down the path away from the lake, and said, “March.”

  Gray and I marched.

  The dead man followed. The road led downward, away from the water and light. The wood here was gloomy, filled with ancient oaks, and mist hung like wraiths in the shadow of the spreading branches and kept out the sun. We found our way through the trees with difficulty, because the big, gnarled roots invaded the narrow path. There was no leaving it, because dark water stood in the hollows between the roots. Serpents moved in the water. Both Gray and I were afraid of them. The path wound this way and that between the trees, and we despaired of ever finding our way back, even should we win our freedom.

  Yet there was life in this woods. The trees, thick-barked and black as they were, wore clusters of oak leaves that shone wetly like dark jade carvings in the murky light the fog let in. Beyond the path, I could hear birds among the branches. They were small finches of gray and green, no bigger than my thumb. Here and there I heard the wild pigs snuffling as they searched for the big acorns the trees dropped. The acorns were big, long, and fair, with brown coverings and deep, well-sealed cups.

  I paused to watch one of the tiny birds investigate the meat of one that lay crushed on the path. I felt, rather than saw, the dead man come up behind me. I jumped forward. The bird flew. I turned and looked up at him. He was very close, and I could clearly see the death wound in his chest sewn shut and the other where his neck had been severed to take his head. It was as though I could feel the chill he radiated freezing me.

  “Do not despise me, fair one,” he said. “This taking is by no will of mine. I am but a messenger, an emissary, sent by the Lord of the Dead. I was long ago dedicated to his service. It would not have been my choice to be a man of Dis.”

  My hair was braided and pinned up at my neck. I brushed it and felt the moisture of the fog that drenched it. “How did you die?” I asked, looking up at his bloodless face.

  “Long and long and long ago, my people came here. Before cairns and barrows, houses, cattle, forts, and kings. We looked upon it and knew it would be ours. It was new and the gods danced in the night sky with draperies of light.”

  The aurora, the northern lights, I thought.

  “Nothing is without price, and the lot fell on me. I was sufficient, they thought. A finer warrior, a greater hunter never lived. You would not give the gods less than the best. So they dug a pit, for I must die three times. Then I was set head down in the pit. When I was in the pit, I admit I was weak. I struggled to breathe. Then they pulled me out. I looked on light for the last time—I never knew how precious it was, for I was vain of my accomplishments—then the spear went through my heart. I dimly felt them take my head. From that time on, I served the Lord of the Dead.”

  His tale filled me with sadness. I turned away with tears in my eyes. I could not despise him. No.

  The path and its difficulty continued until we reached a tree on a low hummock. It was lightning-blasted long ago, only half alive. The other half was hung with the heads of men.

  The servant of Dis carried food. Dead limbs littered the ground.

  “We must rest,” I told our guide. “We have come a long way and are weary.”

  At the base of the tree, flat stones formed a ring around a place that seemed a hearth. I stirred the ashes with my toe. “Fire?” I asked our guide.

  “Passersby come here to the wildwood. Some light fires,” he said. Then he went to a hollow log, pulled out coarse meal and a bottle of oil.

  It was cold here. The wind from snow-covered peaks beyond the lake brushed the hilltop. Looking behind, I could see the lake in the distance, and in places the sun shone on it. Below, the forest was filled with white fog, green leaves, and dark water. To one side, far, very far away, I saw sun and a shining city. Flying buttresses supporting slender towers climbed into the clouds of red, purple, violet, pink, yellow, all with edges shining in the city’s light. The green hills near the city were covered in long grass that seemed to dance with the winds of summer.

  “What is that?” I asked our guide.

  “The timeless place,” he said. “The heart of light. But we cannot go there. Lady, you are for the dark.”

  And, indeed, ahead of us I saw smoke and thick black clouds with lightning among them, long writhing flashes twisted like serpents of brilliance.

  “Let us make a fire here before the rain comes upon us,” I said. “If you have flour and oil, I can make bread.”

  Gray collected some deadfalls; they littered the ground, fallen from the shattered oak. The dead half of the tree bore its evil fruit. They swung by the hair from its boughs, bleached white by wind and rain. They had the look of men long dead—withered skin, empty sockets that once held eyes and many teeth. When Gray was finished collecting the wood, I seized one long, twisted branch in my hand, and it burst into a blossom of fire.

  The warrior stepped back with an exclamation, but most strange were the heads. I heard whispers. They sounded like a room full of people who have seen a wonder and speak of it in low tones among themselves.

&nb
sp; “What is this place?” I asked our guide. The fire was blazing now.

  “These are those who can go to neither the dark nor the light. These are the false. False to their friends, to those they loved, to all those who did them good, who loved them, who deserved kinder treatment at their hands. Those they betrayed, to the ruin of both body and soul. No one will accept them—neither heaven nor hell, paradise nor desolation, light nor dark, will let them in. Here they remain.”

  I knelt and turned my eyes away from them, kneaded the bread and cooked it on a flat rock heated by the fire. Gray and I were ravenous, and we ate every scrap, though it was poor stuff—the flour brown with weevils working in it. They speckled the bread like caraway seeds.

  Our captor, guide—who knows what he was—tasted a bit, only a bit, that I gave him. Then I asked him to remember the sun. He almost smiled, and I took his hand with both of mine. I remembered what I had thought about last night when I’d healed Gray. We were kneeling in a circle around the dying fire. The wind was blowing, and it was very quiet. All I could hear was its low keening in my ears. I dreamed of forests, endless forests—pine, spruce, fir, drifted deep in snow, white, shining, pale as spindrift blown from the tops of waves. Of people wearing skins, who hunted through the forest, laughing.

  I knelt, looking across the fire at a girl. She was as fair as I am fair; it was clear she loved laughter and life. There was a vast sense of primal innocence and peace. Then it ended.

  He was dead, and I didn’t expect him to change, but he did; and I wondered what I might have done, because, though he looked the same, there was life in the eyes when they looked into mine when there had been none before. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Then we bowed our heads and prayed for a short time. Gray and I made the sign of the cross. We rose and left the tree with its sad, evil fruit and walked on into the darkness.

  When we reached the plain, I could smell the fires. The smoke was borne toward us over a wasteland of stone, cold in spite of the flames rising from the fissure in the rock. Both Gray and I were barefoot. I had accepted it now. We—no—I had been summoned to the darkness by the Lord of the Dead. I cannot think why Gray had accompanied me but that he felt close. We had always been friends, but Maeniel and Dugald had warned me. Death is the fate not just of our kind, but of all living things. Maeniel told me once that a very wise woman told him that if we did not die, we could not live. I have been overjoyed to live. Everything has its price. It was very strange that a boar should come to me, come to summon me. They are the messengers to kings. I am not much. Bodiccia’s line caused it, though; it is an important family, nurtured through the centuries by the noble houses of Ireland.

  If death be the last thing I do, why, I pray the gods and heroes of my people that I try to do it as well as I have done more pleasant things. So Gray and I hobbled on, but when our guide saw we were suffering, he stopped and improvised shoes from the hide he wore. It was, he told me, the skin of the aurochs, the great bull of the woods, he wore.

  They were crude footwear, made after the manner of ours. The hide is cut to the measure of the foot, a little larger, then holes are cut in the sides to hold the thong that is attached to the ankle and leg. After this, we walked more comfortably. We went hand in hand now. Gray held mine in his. Fire and ice, that was all around us now. Cold, ink-black stone with fissures through which flames leaped, heating the nearby air. As we drew away, we felt again the cold wind that swept across the wasteland.

  The sky was thickly clouded; the fires reflected their light against the clouds. When we topped a rise, I saw the hall of Dis. Three rings of fire and in the center a throne overlooking the central pyre.

  “I must go first,” our guide told me. “The bridges are unseen.”

  The throne of Dis is the meaning of the maze. We walked around the first ring till our guide told us to stop. Then he crossed; the bridge was only a shadow over the flames. I followed, my feet feeling their way because I could see nothing. Once the fire roared up around me, the flames licking my arms and legs.

  I closed my eyes and stood fast. I whispered—yes, Dugald had taught me some things—“A compact with thee, Fire. Fire, do not harm me.” And it didn’t, neither did it burn my clothes. I was mindful of Gray. “A compact with thee, Fire,” I whispered. “Do not harm my friend.” Then I added, “Please,” because it doesn’t do to be insolent with the elements.

  The fire didn’t harm Gray, but it did burn some of his clothing. His trousers were handwoven wool. They smoldered. His shirt was linen, and it was left in ruins.

  Our guide nodded. “She witched you,” he said.

  Gray was very pale, but only said, “Lead on.”

  “We must walk,” our guide said. “He—” he inclined his head toward a distant figure on the throne in the center “—changes their position from time to time.”

  “What if he changes them while we are in transit?” I asked.

  “That,” said Gray, “is really a fool’s question. Enough already. If I think on it too much, I will be useless. Don’t answer.”

  “You are brave, both very brave. Most of those I have conducted hither were gibbering with terror by now,” our guide said.

  “Well, we are, but trying to put the best face on it,” I said. “Pert,” Gray said. “No matter what the circumstances, ever pert.”

  Our guide responded with only a smile. Gray seemed to find it rather ghastly, because he looked quickly away. But I returned it with a smile of my own. It took an effort to surmount my terrors, but I did.

  “Talorcan is my name,” our guide told me. “It is a word of power. Summon me if you will as boar or a ghost. I am a mighty man. For this is my payment for my sacrifice. I feel the steel in my heart when it is spoken.”

  We had reached the second bridge. The fire no longer made trial of our courage. We crossed easily and had no difficulty with the third, and then we stood before the dreaded Lord of the Dead. Gray went to one knee before the father of nightmares, but I stood my ground.

  “You have no right to conduct us here. We are yet living,” I said, “and you have no power over us.”

  You see, up to then I had not thought my ancestry a real thing. Bodiccia. What folly; I am a poor girl. I hunt, cook, clean, tend fields and our garden, and learn spinning, weaving, and dyeing at Kyra’s feet. And I shall make the best bargain I can with some lordling and do all those same things in his household. And in addition, I will share his bed and bear his children. This is the lot of an ordinary woman, and if he be loving and generous, and I industrious and honest, it is not a bad one.

  But now I understood, to my sorrow, that Dugald had been right. I am no ordinary woman, and born to a different fate. I would not go whimpering. The thing on the throne chose to be amused by me, not offended, and it laughed. Even its laughter was a horror. The flames from the pit at its feet leaped and writhed around it. They were like serpents, these flames, and they coiled, uncoiled, twisted, hissed, and tried to bite. One leaped at my foot above the spot where the laces held my shoe. I felt the fangs press at my skin, but then they dissolved, sparking away into nothingness.

  The throne it sat on was an evil sort of thing, a mockery of the garden of life, of an apple tree. The throne itself was made of steel, with leaves of emerald, flowers of bone, and apples of ruby. The fire which would have destroyed any ordinary fruit left them unharmed. Besides the apples the tree was also hung with the fruits of both victory and defeat: the heads of men. They were living yet and joined their master, the king of the dead, in laughter.

  The face of the creature on the throne changed sickeningly. Now covered with blood; now withered, wasted by disease and pain; now bloated by drowning or twisted by torture. He was all death and all death was met in him; and I felt very small, a sparrow in the talons of a hawk, and I understood what it meant to despair.

  One of the heads spoke loudly enough for me to hear. “Hs-s-s-t, my lord.” And death inclined his face to it, where it hung among the leaves and fru
it on an iron bough.

  They spoke together in low voices.

  Then the Lord of the Dead laughed again. “That should do nicely,” he said. One shadow hand pointed to a place on the right of the throne, at the edge of the pit. Then he directed Gray to the left, so we stood facing each other over the fire.

  “Hear now my ruling, my geas, and you—each and both—must accept it. She will be your second wife, Gray, and you will lie with her here before my throne. And you, Gwenifyr, will serve him all the remainder of your days, until I welcome you both into my realm forever. You—each and both—will have none but each other now and for whatever lifetimes you have to come.”

  It was a dreadful curse. We would be bound to each other for all time. Slaves through the years, living out stunted lives together. If we tried to escape, the geas would bring us to death, and from death we would return to live again, only to be condemned to the same ghastly fate as before, world without end.

  Then Gray showed what he was made of. I was in tears. Yes, truly I was, because, you see, I only half comprehended the sheer awfulness of it. But Gray met the face of nothingness, and he said, “No.”

  The sound was like a crack of the lash; and indeed, a whip of fire encircled Gray’s body. When it faded, he was both burned and bleeding in a dozen places. He staggered to his knees, sobbing and crying out with pain. The fire lash cracked again. Gray screamed and screamed, in a way that made even Talorcan cringe, until Gray lay facedown in a pool of blood.

  I watched as he struggled to his knees. I saw what remained of his clothing was drenched with blood, and one eye was gone, sucked out by the lash.

  I screamed, and for a moment I felt myself surrender to the horror I felt. “No! No! Stop! I’ll do whatever you want, only don’t hurt him anymore.”

  “See.” Death laughed again. “See, little one, how easily you break? Now.” He gestured toward Gray. “Come around to the front of my throne and consummate your marriage.”