Dragonfield

by Jane Yolen

  On hearing this, the innkeeper began to scrabble through the remains of his camel like a soothsayer through entrails. But all he could find in the stomach was a compote of nuts, grains, olives, grape seeds, and a damp and bedraggled feather off the hat of a whore who had recently plied her trade at his hostelry.

  “No jewel,” he said at last with a sigh.

  “Probably crushed to powder when the luck was freed,” said the farmer.

  “Then if there is no jewel,” said the captain, “where is this supposed luck? I told you I did not believe in it.”

  At which very moment, the severed remains of the camel began to shimmer and reattach themselves, ligament to limb, muscle to bone; and with a final snap as loud as a thunderclap, the reanimation stood and opened its eyes. The one eye was sane. But the wandering eye, Benevolencies, was as black and shiny and ripe as a grape and orbited like a malevolent star ’round elliptic and uncharted galaxies.

  The four men departed the premises at once in a tangle of arms, legs, and screams. The innkeeper, not an hour later, sold his inn to a developer, sight unseen, who desired to level it for an even larger hostelry. The priest converted within the day to the Red Faith where he rose quickly through the ranks to a minor, minor functionary. The farmer joined the Levar’s Guard where he was given a far better sword with which he wounded himself serving the Levar Modzi of the Flat Dome. And the captain—well, he sold the jewel, black and shiny and ripe as a grape, which he had stolen from the turban the night before and replaced with an olive because he did not believe in magic but he certainly believed in money. He bought himself a new ship which he sailed quite carefully around the shoals of the Eel. There had been no luck in the jewel after all, for the priest’s master had had as little skill as ambition, no luck except that which a sly man could convert to coin.

  Then what of the camel? Had his revival been a trick? Oh, there had been luck there, freed by his death which had occurred at the exact day and hour and minute five years after his birth. But the luck had been in the whore’s feather which she had taken from a drunken mage who had bound his magic in it, creating a talisman of great sexual potency. So the demon camel, that walking boneyard, ravaged the inn site and impregnated a hundred and twenty local camels—and one very surprised mare—before the magic dwindled and the ghostly demon fell apart into a collection of rotted parts. But those camels sired by him still haunt this particular place; spitting chomping, reproducing, and getting into one kind of mischief after another.

  And each and every one of those little demons, Tremendousies, is marked by a wandering eye.

  The Hundredth Dove

  THERE ONCE LIVED in the forest of old England a fowler named Hugh who supplied all the game birds for the high king’s table.

  The larger birds he hunted with a bow, and it was said of him that he never shot but that a bird fell, and sometimes two. But for the smaller birds that flocked like gray clouds over the forest, he used only a silken net he wove himself. This net was soft and fine and did not injure the birds though it held them fast. Then Hugh the fowler could pick and choose the plumpest of the doves for the high king’s table and set the others free.

  One day in early summer, Hugh was summoned to court and brought into the throne room.

  Hugh bowed low, for it was not often that he was called into the king’s own presence. And indeed he felt uncomfortable in the palace, as though caught in a stone cage.

  “Rise, fowler, and listen,” said the king. “In one week’s time I am to be married.” Then, turning with a smile to the woman who sat by him, the king held out her hand to the fowler.

  The fowler stared up at her. She was neat as a bird, slim and fair, with black eyes. There was a quiet in her, but a restlessness too. He had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  Hugh took the tiny hand offered him and put his lips to it, but he only dared to kiss the gold ring that glittered on her finger.

  The king looked carefully at the fowler and saw how he trembled. It made the king smile. “See, my lady, how your beauty turns the head of even my fowler. And he is a man who lives as solitary as a monk in his wooded cell.”

  The lady smiled and said nothing, but she drew her hand away from Hugh.

  The king then turned again to the fowler. “In honor of my bride, the Lady Columba, whose name means dove and whose beauty is celebrated in all the world, I wish to serve one hundred of the birds at our wedding feast.”

  Lady Columba gasped and held up her hand. “Please do not serve them, sire.”

  But the king said to the fowler, “I have spoken. Do not fail me, fowler.”

  “As you command,” said Hugh, and he bowed again. He touched his hand to his tunic, where his motto, Servo (“I serve”), was sewn over the heart.

  Then the fowler went immediately back to the cottage deep in the forest where he lived.

  There he took out the silken net and spread it upon the floor. Slowly he searched the net for snags and snarls and weakened threads. These he rewove with great care, sitting straightbacked at his wooden loom.

  After a night and a day he was done. The net was as strong as his own stout heart. He laid the net down on the hearth and slept a dreamless sleep.

  Before dawn Hugh set out into the forest clearing which only he knew. The trails he followed were narrower than deer runs, for the fowler needed no paths to show him the way. He knew every tree, every stone in the forest as a lover knows the form of his beloved. And he served the forest easily as well as he served the high king.

  The clearing was full of life, yet so silently did the fowler move, neither bird nor insect remarked his coming. He crouched at the edge, his brown and green clothes a part of the wood. Then he waited.

  A long patience was his strength, and he waited the whole of the day, neither moving nor sleeping. At dusk the doves came, settling over the clearing like a gray mist. And when they were down and greedily feeding, Hugh leaped up and swung the net over the nearest ones in a single swift motion.

  He counted twenty-one doves in his net, all but one gray-blue and meaty. The last was a dove that was slim, elegant, and white as milk. Yet even as Hugh watched, the white dove slipped through the silken strands that bound it and flew away into the darkening air.

  Since Hugh was not the kind of hunter to curse his bad luck, but rather one to praise his good, he gathered up the twenty and went home. He placed the doves in a large wooden cage whose bars he had carved out of white oak.

  Then he looked at his net. There was not a single break in it, no way for the white dove to have escaped. Hugh thought long and hard about this, but at last he lay down to the cooing of the captured birds and slept.

  In the morning the fowler was up at dawn. Again he crept to the forest clearing and waited, quieter than any stone, for the doves. And again he threw his net at dusk and caught twenty fat gray doves and the single white one.

  But as before, the white dove slipped through his net as easily as air.

  The fowler carried the gray doves home and caged them with the rest. But his mind was filled with the sight of the white bird, slim and fair. He was determined to capture it.

  For five days and nights it was the same except for this one thing: On the fifth night there were only nineteen gray doves in his net. He was short of the hundred by one. Yet he had taken all of the birds in the flock but the white dove.

  Hugh looked into the hearth fire but he felt no warmth. He placed his hand upon the motto above his heart. “I swear by the king whom I serve and by the lady who will be his queen that I will capture that bird,” he said. “I will bring the hundred doves to them. I shall not fail.”

  So the sixth day, well before dawn, the fowler arose. He checked the net one final time and saw it was tight. Then he was away to the clearing.

  All that day Hugh sat at the clearing’s edge, still as a stone. The meadow was full of life. Songbirds sang that had never sung before. Strange flowers grew and blossomed and died at his feet yet he never looked at them
. Animals that had once been and were no longer came out of the forest shadows and passed him by: the hippocampus, the gryphon, and the silken swift unicorn. But he never moved. It was for the white dove he waited, and at last she came.

  In the quickening dark she floated down, feather-light and luminous at the clearing’s edge. Slowly she moved, eating and cooing and calling for her missing flock. She came in the end to where Hugh sat and began to feed at his feet.

  He moved his hands once and the net was over her, then his hands were over her, too. The dove twisted and pecked but he held her close, palms upon wings, fingers on neck.

  When the white dove saw she could not move, she turned her bright black eyes on the fowler and spoke to him in a cooing woman’s voice.

  “Master fowler, set me free.

  Gold and silver I’ll give thee.”

  “Neither gold nor silver tempt me,” said Hugh. “Servo is my motto. I serve my master. And my master is the king.”

  Then the white dove spoke again:

  “Master fowler, set me free,

  Fame and fortune follow thee.”

  But the fowler shook his head and held on tight. “After the king, I serve the forest,” he said. “Fame and fortune are not masters here.” He rose with the white dove in his hands and made ready to return to his house.

  Then the bird shook itself all over and spoke for a third time. Its voice was low and beguiling:

  “Master fowler, free this dove,

  The queen will be your own true love.”

  For the first time, then, though night was almost on them, the fowler noticed the golden ring that glittered and shone on the dove’s foot. As if in a vision, he saw the Lady Columba again, slim and neat and fair. He heard her voice and felt her hand in his.

  He began to tremble and his heart began to pulse madly. He felt a burning in his chest and limbs. Then he looked down at the dove and it seemed to be smiling at him, its black eyes glittering.

  “Servo” he cried out, his voice shaking. “Servo.” He closed his eyes and twisted the dove’s neck. Then he touched the motto on his tunic. He could feel the word Servo impress itself coldly on his fingertips. One quick rip and the motto was torn from his breast. He flung it to the meadow floor, put the limp dove in his pouch, and went through the forest to his home.

  The next day the fowler brought the hundred doves—the ninety-nine live ones and the one dead—to the king’s kitchen. But there never was a wedding.

  The fowler gave up hunting and lived on berries and fruit the rest of his life. Every day he made his way to the clearing to throw out grain for the birds. Around his neck, from a chain, a gold ring glittered. And occasionally he would touch the spot on his tunic, above his heart, which was shredded and torn.

  But though songbirds and sparrows ate his grain, and swallows came at his calling, he never saw another dove.

  The Lady and the Merman

  “Wheresoever love goes, the lover follows.”

  ONCE IN A HOUSE overlooking the cold northern sea a baby was born. She was so plain, her father, a sea captain, remarked on it.

  “She shall be a burden,” he said. “She shall be on our hands forever.” Then without another glance at the child he sailed off on his great ship.

  His wife, who had longed to please him, was so hurt by his complaint that she soon died of it. Between one voyage and the next, she was gone.

  When the captain came home and found this out, he was so enraged, he never spoke of his wife again. In this way he convinced himself that her loss was nothing.

  But the girl lived and grew as if to spite her father. She looked little like her dead mother but instead had the captain’s face set round with mouse-brown curls. Yet as plain as her face was, her heart was not. She loved her father but was not loved in return.

  And still the captain remarked on her looks. He said at every meeting, “God must have wanted me cursed to give me such a child. No one will have her. She shall never be wed. She shall be with me forever.” So he called her Borne, for she was his burden.

  Borne grew into a lady and only once gave a sign of this hurt.

  “Father,” she said one day when he was newly returned from the sea, “what can I do to heal this wound between us?”

  He looked away from her, for he could not bear to see his own face mocked in hers, and spoke to the cold stone floor. “There is nothing between us, daughter,” he said. “But if there were, I would say Salt for such wounds.”

  “Salt?” Borne asked.

  “A sailor’s balm,” he said. “The salt of tears or the salt of sweat or the final salt of the sea.” Then he turned from her and was gone next day to the farthest port he knew of, and in this way he cleansed his heart.

  After this, Borne never spoke of it again. Instead, she carried it silently like a dagger inside. For the salt of tears did not salve her, and so she turned instead to work. She baked bread in her ovens for the poor, she nursed the sick, she held the hands of the sea widows. But always, late in the evening, she walked on the shore looking and longing for a sight of her father’s sail. Only less and less often did he return from the sea.

  One evening, tired from the work of the day, Borne felt faint as she walked on the strand. Finding a rock half in half out of the water, she climbed upon it to rest. She spread her skirts about her, and in the dusk they lay like great gray waves.

  How long she sat there, still as the rock, she did not know. But a strange pale moon came up. And as it rose, so too rose the little creatures of the deep. They leaped free for a moment of the pull of the tide. And last of all, up from the deeps, came the merman.

  He rose out of the crest of the wave, seafoam crowning his green-black hair. His hands were raised high above him, and the webbings of his fingers were as colorless as air. In the moonlight he seemed to stand upon his tail. Then, with a flick of it, he was gone, gone back to the deeps. He thought no one had remarked his dive.

  But Borne had. So silent and still, she saw it all, his beauty and his power. She saw him and loved him, though she loved the fish half of him more. It was all she could dare.

  She could not tell what she felt to a soul, for she had no one who cared. Instead she forsook her work and walked by the sea both morning and night. Yet, strange to say, she never once looked for her father’s sail.

  That is why one day her father returned without her knowing. He watched her pacing the shore for a long while through slotted eyes, for he would not look straight upon her. At last he said, “Be done with it. Whatever ails you, give it over.” For even he could see this wound.

  Borne looked up at him, her eyes shimmering with small seas. Grateful for his attention, she answered, “Yes, Father, you are right. I must be done with it.”

  The captain turned and left her then, for his food was cold. But Borne went directly to the place where the waves were creeping onto the shore. She called out in a low voice, “Come up. Come up and be my love.”

  There was no answer except the shrieking laughter of the birds as they dived into the sea.

  So she took a stick and wrote the same words upon the sand for the merman to see should he ever return. Only, as she watched, the creeping tide erased her words one by one. Soon there was nothing left of her cry on that shining strand.

  So Borne sat herself down on the rock to cry. And each tear was an ocean.

  But the words were not lost. Each syllable washed from the beach was carried below, down, down, down to the deeps of the cool, inviting sea. And there, below on his coral bed, the merman saw her call and came.

  He was all day swimming up to her. He was half the night seeking that particular strand. But when he came, cresting the currents, he surfaced with a mighty splash below Borne’s rock.

  The moon shone down on the two, she a grave shadow perched upon a stone and he all motion and light.

  Borne reached down with her white hands and he caught them in his. It was the only touch she could remember. She smiled to see the webs stretched tau
t between his fingers. He laughed to see hers webless, thin, and small. One great pull between them and he was up by her side. Even in the dark she could see his eyes on her under the phosphoresence of his hair.

  He sat all night by her. And Borne loved the man of him as well as the fish, then, for in the silent night it was all one.

  Then, before the sun could rise, she dropped his hands on his chest. “Can you love me?” she dared to ask at last.

  But the merman had no tongue to tell her above the waves. He could only speak below the water with his hands, a soft murmuration. So, wordlessly, he stared into her eyes and pointed to the sea.

  Then, with the sun just rising beyond the rim of the world, he turned, dived arrow slim into a wave, and was gone.

  Gathering her skirts, now heavy with ocean spray and tears, Borne stood up. She cast but one glance at the shore and her father’s house beyond. Then she dived after the merman into the sea.

  The sea put bubble jewels in her hair and spread her skirts about her like a scallop shell. Tiny colored fish swam in between her fingers. The water cast her face in silver, and all the sea was reflected in her eyes.

  She was beautiful for the first time. And for the last.

  Angelica

  Linz, Austria, 1898

  THE BOY COULD NOT sleep. It was hot and he had been sick for so long. All night his head had throbbed. Finally he sat up and managed to get out of bed. He went down the stairs without stumbling.

  Elated at his progress, he slipped from the house without waking either his mother or father. His goal was the river bank. He had not been there in a month.