The ground shook. With a symphony of frightened hisses and chitters, the snakes and scorpions fled from the dragon. Half a dozen scorpions sprang from Neriya’s clothes and skittered away.
That’s something, at least, Neriya thought. Although his legs were so swollen already that he hadn’t been feeling the stings anymore. He felt the scorpions’ venom only in the catch of his breath and the shaking of his hands.
“Little dove,” he rasped, “I don’t want you to see this.” Whether he won or lost, there was nothing she could do to help.
The God Who Answers promised that you would wake the city, she told him, flickering just over his shoulder. He could almost imagine he felt fingers brush his face. I won’t leave you!
The dragon lurched forward, clumsy in its unaccustomed shape, jaws gaping to reveal double rows of teeth. Neriya dove aside then rolled to his feet and chopped at its flanks. Its head whipped around, darting on that long neck, and it hit him with open jaws. It probably meant to bite, but instead it knocked him away. He rolled and leaped high, stabbing into the dragon’s open mouth with his spear. But it shut its jaws with a snap, breaking the spear in half.
Well, that’s unfortunate, Neriya thought distantly. He whacked the broken spear-haft across the dragon’s nose then turned to run. If he could reach the thorn wall, surely there would be somewhere he could wriggle in, where the dragon couldn’t reach him? In with all the snakes and scorpions. It wasn’t a very good idea, but it was the only one he had.
No! Palli cried. Neriya whirled to see the Kashap-dragon right behind him, beginning to strike. The small gray shape darted at the dragon’s eyes, wrapping herself around its head. Blinded, the dragon roared. Neriya ran forward.
Kashap shook his head wildly. The dreaming princess clung for a moment then lost her position and drifted away. Kashap stretched out his neck and belched a cloud of darkness toward her. It curled around her, and Palli screamed. The dragon’s lip curled in satisfaction.
Neriya saw the darkness swallow her. “Little dove!” he shouted, and leaped. The dragon, distracted, didn’t move in time. Neriya’s axe bit deep into its neck.
With a hissing gurgle, the tannin fell to the ground. Black ichor trickled from around the axe head. With a furious hiss, Kashap lurched, trying to get up and attack again—but his writhing was his undoing. Neriya still clung to the handle of the axe. When the tannin’s thrashing tail caught Neriya in the ribs and knocked him sprawling, the axe was pulled free, tearing the wound wider.
The tannin still tried to get up, but the ichor pouring from its neck dispersed into black mist. Scales rained down from its body, turning to smoke before they hit the ground. The dragon twisted and shrank, its great claws and long neck vanishing, until it became a man once more.
Kashap looked up at Neriya through the film of age that covered his burning eyes. “I have still won,” he choked. “If you do not wake the city before night falls, everyone within it will die!” He gave a final gasp and lay still.
Neriya did not know whether the old man spoke truth or lies. But he had no further interest in the sorcerer. “Little dove!” he shouted. “Little dove!” But there was no fluttering gray shadow anywhere. Could the sorcerer have hurt her with his magic? Neriya thought with a thrill of fear. He turned and rushed toward the wall of thorns, striking with all his might—a seventh time.
With a crack, the thorn trunk parted. Other cracks followed as the briars beyond pulled back, leaving a narrow path toward Gubla’s walls. Neriya ran in without a thought for snakes or scorpions. Brambles caught at his clothes and his beard, but he ignored them. He passed through the wall of thorns and scrambled up the eroding bulwarks, using the last of the briars as footholds to climb the city wall. His hands bleeding from the thorns, his legs numb with scorpion stings, he ran down into the city.
It was dark here already, the thorns overhead shutting out the light. He nearly stumbled over the first sleeper. “Wake up!” he cried, shaking the man. But the man did not stir.
How can I wake them? His little dove had not told him. I must find her! She would know what to do. If only—if only the sorcerer’s magic did not—
The thought was too horrible; Neriya could not let himself think it!
Neriya ran through the city, stopping only to look into the faces of the few people that he found. Then, when he reached a wider street, he began finding more. Hundreds of people, all in their finest clothes, tumbled in heaps on the road. He looked into face after face, but there were too many of them. And how could he be sure if he found her? He had never seen her face, not really!
“She said she was the guardian, the guardian of their beauty,” he muttered to himself. “She was getting married . . .” She should be apart from the others, not buried under one of these piles. He ran up toward the larger buildings. The palace and temples ought to be in the highest part of the city, surely?
Here was a dais, a collection of altars. There—didn’t that man look like a king, with his graying hair worn in a royal club at the back of his head?
“Little dove!”
There she was. She lay sleeping like all the others, face down on the dais with one hand outstretched toward her father. He knew her at once.
Carefully he knelt beside her and turned her face toward the sky. The braided rug had left a pattern on her skin, a mark like the one on his own cheek. “Wake up, little dove!” He shook her gently. She didn’t stir. “Little dove!” he shouted, but that didn’t wake her either.
Wincing, he pinched the skin on the back of her hand then smoothed the mark out apologetically. “Little dove?” I should have made her tell me her name! Maybe then she would wake for me.
Was it getting even darker in here? He looked up toward where the hidden sun ought to be. Were Kashap’s last words true? Would the people of Gubla die when the sun set? How terrible, to journey so far, only to be the instrument of the city’s final destruction instead of its help! And yet he might have known it would be this way—was he not cursed from his birth? He reached up to scratch futilely at the mark on his cheek.
Her face—it was so still. The rise and fall of her chest was so slight that it hardly stirred the beads of her necklace. “No, little dove,” he whispered. “Don’t die!” He had to wake her somehow!
He leaned down and kissed her.
Palli sighed. Her last dream had been very unpleasant, she thought as she rose toward waking. She was surprised when, instead of floating in the sky, she found herself lying on the ground, her head pillowed on someone’s leg. She opened her eyes. “N-Neriya?”
“Peace, peace. Everything’s all right now,” he said, his face slack with relief.
As the people of Gubla woke, light began to filter down from overhead. The thorns were withdrawing from above the city.
Palli rose to her feet, wobbling slightly, weak after a century of dreaming. Waking at all is a miracle. You truly do answer, don’t you? she breathed toward a patch of sky.
“Did Kashap hurt you?” Neriya asked, tugging worriedly at his beard. “I didn’t think anything could touch you!”
“I’m all right,” Palli told him, patting him gently on the shoulder. She thought dimly that this was not how she would have acted toward a man once upon a time, but that time was long ago. She reached up and touched her own face. Don’t I look any older? Yet she remembered a hundred years of dreams!
Her father groaned, and she threw off her bewilderment to run to him, half tripping over her own gilded sandals. It felt so strange to walk on feet instead of floating weightless through the air. “Father, are you well?”
Shokorru took her hand without looking at it, and she pulled him to his feet. “Yes, yes,” he rumbled. Then he looked at her and dropped her hand with a frown. “Is the curse broken, Aplati-shamirat-yaftinu?”
Palli shivered. It was a long time since she had heard her name. She bowed her head a little and stepped back. “It is broken, O-king-my-father.”
Shokorru’s gaze went past her, and he
fixed Neriya with a glare. “So you’re the son-in-law I was promised? Tell me who you are and how you broke the curse.”
Son-in-law? Did the city not fall asleep in the middle of the princess’s wedding? Neriya thought, puzzled, but let it go. Perhaps the king was still confused from his long sleep.
The king of Gubla looked like a mighty warrior, but he was nowhere near as fearsome as the King of the Four Quarters, Neriya’s own father. Neriya bowed and said, “Mighty king, your servant is Nerbalatan, the third son of Ilnadinshumi, King of the Four Quarters, Master of the Black-Headed People.”
“Ilnadinshumi?” Shokorru said suspiciously. “I know the name of the King of the Four Quarters—that isn’t it.”
“I fear that you have slept long, O king,” Neriya told him sympathetically. He was watching his dove out of the corner of his eye. She looked as if she were deciding whether to glide away or not. He did not want her to go, so he offered her his arm. She took it with a little smile. “Much has happened since Gubla began to sleep.”
“Arinna and Pirulat are gone,” Palli told her father quietly. “But the pirates are gone too, fled or resettled years ago.”
“Aplati, stop your lips,” her father said, not unkindly. “You, Nerbalatan, tell me the whole tale.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
So Neriya told it all—how he had seen his little dove hovering in the palace; how he had travelled; how he had faced the snakes, scorpions, and Kashap-dragon. As he spoke, the king’s expression grew stranger and stranger. When Neriya finally stopped, Shokorru muttered to himself, “‘A noble heart from a far off place; seized by a vision he follows the road; he will not be stopped by serpents and scorpions.’ By the third heaven, it is just as that old man said!”
“I don’t believe it!” came a loud voice. Etlu-kashid pushed through the crowd that had grown around them as Neriya told his tale. “Dragons! Giant scorpions! Birds! What kind of fools do you take us for? This man is no brave warrior! So he is dusty—so he fell into a scorpion nest! This proves nothing!”
“He is telling the truth,” Palli said sternly, holding a little more tightly to Neriya’s arm. “He did all the things that he has said, and more.”
“King Shokorru, I am your heir,” the angry shield-bearer insisted. “You chose me to marry your daughter! You never believed that old prophecy! This foreigner has heard the tale and come to fool us with fanciful words! Let me kill the lying dog!”
Neriya, who was beginning to feel provoked in spite of his exhaustion, rested his hand on his axe handle and stared at Etlu-kashid. “I did not come here to challenge you for the kingship. I came because this lady asked for help.” He hasn’t even looked at her! Does he care only for the throne and not for her? He didn’t think his dove should marry this fellow after all.
The young shield-carrier snorted. “If anyone would believe such a claim, let the Lady of Gubla smite me!”
“You are fortunate that the Lady of Gubla never hears us,” Shokorru growled. “Because I believe him. The God Who Answers has not only answered but has delivered what he promised. I am not such a fool as to go against the only god I have ever found who cares about my city.”
Etlu-kashid fumed, but he backed away.
“This young man is right that I am not a mighty warrior,” Neriya told the king. “Worse than that, I am cursed by the gods, as you see by this mark on my face. Let him be king, if you have chosen him.” He stopped and swallowed hard. “But—such curses do not usually attack women—I would—if you do not fear the curse—” He stopped, blinking helplessly at Palli.
“He would like to marry me, O-king-my-father,” Palli said quietly, her gray eyes steady on Neriya’s face.
“Yes,” the prince agreed, looking back at her. “Just so.”
“Hmmph,” grunted Shokorru, looking from one of them to the other. “First! I have said that the man who marries my daughter Palli will be king after me, and so he shall. Second! If any gods have cursed you, they can take it up with the God Who Answers, who has obviously blessed you. Third! If a god is going to trouble himself to find me a son-in-law, I’m not going to reject him. So marry my daughter, and I’ll make you my heir, and we’ll be done with it.”
Neriya took a deep breath and let it out again before he could speak. At last, in a strong voice, he said, “If you are decided, mighty king, then let it be as you say.”
And behold, it was as the king had said. Palli and Neriya were married, and Neriya was made heir. Almost the first thing he did with his new position was to put Etlu-kashid in charge of driving all of the snakes and scorpions out of Gubla. The shield-bearer drove them into the sea—to the great excitement of the people of Gubla, who watched from the cliffs as the Litan devoured the nasty creatures in great gulps.
And if, after Neriya became king, the king of Gubla fought in far fewer battles and had far fewer wives than his predecessor (declaring insistently that one wife was enough for him), nobody seemed to mind. The new King Neriya sent messengers to Perakha’s people, asking for someone to come and tell Gubla more about the God Who Answered; and when the messengers returned, the whole city was seized with an unusual cheer. It was a strange and wonderful thing to have a god who kept his promises and cared about right and wrong rather than incantations and laments.
And sometimes, when the royal children had been borne off to bed by the doting triumvirate of Perakha, Tsalat, and Ashui, the king and queen of Gubla would go out to sit side by side on the cliff and watch the sun go down.
“There it is—the Road to Far Horizon, little dove,” said Neriya. “Should you like to go adventuring there?”
Palli smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Not yet, my shepherd; wait a little while. We shall all go there someday.”
KATHRYN McCONAUGHY is a Christian and has studied at Geneva College (as well as sundry other institutions of higher learning). She is reliably informed that she wrote her first story in second grade; most recently she has been writing a series of young-adult fantasies set in the world of King Arthur. When she’s not writing stories, she enjoys gardening, reading, sword-fighting, and writing papers on obscure aspects of Semitic grammar. Kathryn lives in Maryland with her list of dissertation ideas and her large personal library.
To learn more about Kathryn and her work, visit: www.thelanguageofwriting.blostpot.com
To Mama and Daddy, my heroes.
Thank you both for all of your love, encouragement, and support . . .
Oh, and the chicken nuggets.
I love you both!
Chapter 1
ON THE DAY OF the princess’s eighteenth birthday, mere moments before her kingly father was due to arrive at the hidden castle to celebrate that momentous occasion, the princess, in a fit of dramatic temper, stormed from her bedchamber and escaped the ministering hands of her three aunties. In her desire to find peace from their constant nagging, she fled to the highest tower of the keep and hid in the stairwell. Just as she shut the tower door, she heard them calling her name from somewhere far too close for her comfort.
“No, my dear aunties. I shan’t come out until sundown,” she told herself, the words making her feel ever so much better. “You’ll believe your stupid curse has fallen and be all in a tizzy when Father shows up. Ha! That will teach you three a lesson you won’t soon forget.”
So saying, she climbed the twisting stairway to the tower room, which she expected to find deserted. Instead, upon opening the creaky door, she discovered there an old woman—so old and so deaf, she must never have heard of the king’s command to destroy all spinning wheels in the realm, for there she sat, spinning and spinning.
The princess, who had never seen a spinning wheel before in her life, was much more surprised by that strange instrument than by the sight of the old woman herself.
“Whatever are you doing, good old mother?” asked the princess, for she could be polite when the mood took her, and respect for the very old was one of the few manners she’d not ab
andoned.
“I am spinning, my pretty child.”
The princess took several paces into the room. “How do you do it? Let me see if I can spin also.”
So saying, she took the spindle in her hand and, in a moment of rare clumsiness (for the princess had always been graceful beyond measure, due to the blessings allotted her at her birth) she pricked her finger.
Immediately she fell to the floor, as still as the dead.
The old woman clucked and shook her head. “Dear me, the poor girl,” she crooned, but a cruel smile twisted her lips.
Footsteps rang on the stair. As the princess’s three aunties burst into the chamber, the old woman flung up her ragged cloak and disappeared before they had so much as glimpsed her face.
“Members of the board, allow me to recount a summary of the proceedings which have engaged our attention for the past three days.”
The judge’s feeble voice quavered almost as hard as the hand holding the summation document before his withered face. He was so old that one could easily imagine he’d lived during the fabled time of tall elves and fluttering fairies, hundreds and hundreds of years ago! His age-clouded eyes squinted hard through the thickest glasses ever seen by man, and he rolled his lips several times over his wooden dentures as though gearing up for the effort of speaking again.
Nonetheless, the presiding judge of Yoleston court was the most awe-inspiring person Franz had ever seen. Perhaps not for any great personal merit, but simply because he held Franz’s future—his very life—in the palm of his quivering old hand.
Franz sat in the dock, ringed on all sides by solid bars as though already in prison. Two nervous guards flanked him, unwilling to meet his eye whenever he turned to them. Were they . . . were they frightened of him? But he was innocent!
Five Magic Spindles: A Collection of Sleeping Beauty Stories Page 13