The Iron Dragon’s Mother

by Michael Swanwick

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Rabbit said quietly.

  “Oh, yes,” Caitlin breathed.

  At the procession’s approach, the ground crew jumped to open the dragons’ bellies. One by one, the souls were handed down to Teggish underlings, who presented them to the surgeons to be examined for defects. The souls looked like eggs made of light. Two were deemed unsalvageable and turned away for disposal. The others were wrapped in cotton and placed in the utility vehicle.

  “What will become of them?” Caitlin asked.

  “They’ll be implanted in changeling bodies that were born without volition. They’re of little use until they come of age. But they are immune to cold iron, so most of them will be put to work in factories.”

  The ceremony went on for some time, and then the dragons one by one turned away and walked or, in 7708’s case, limped to their resting slots and ground crews.

  * * *

  The gremlins on 7708’s ground crew, save for two feriers for particularly delicate work and one stone giant, employed for the heavy lifting, were red dwarves, muscular little brutes with ginger hair and beards, who were resistant by nature to the iron sickness. Opening the leg casing, Aurvang Hogback, the crew chief, growled, “I heard your landing in my teeth, flygirl!”

  “I felt it someplace softer, Shorty.” Caitlin waited while the dwarf examined every bit of the chassis minutely. Then she said, “So what’s it going to take to fix it?”

  Shorty shoved his hands in his pockets and, staring up into the sky, sucked in his cheeks. “Well…” He drew out the word, as if reluctant to offer an opinion to a superior officer. “There’ll be an investigation, of course, but that’s strictly pro forma. 7708 will be interviewed. Inspectors will crawl through its innards. You’ll be kept out of the sky for a week, maybe two, tops. Then, when all that nonsense is done and over with, we’ll swap out a new leg module.” He met her eye again. “Nothing for you to worry about, milady. If we were to start first thing in the morning, you could have it up in the sky by noon.”

  “That’s a relief. You guys are the greatest.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re here for, innit?” Shorty did not add, “To clean up the messes made by our supposed superiors.” But Caitlin could hear it in his voice. Dwarves were always insolent under their bland masks of obedience—the most one could expect from them was a plausible counterfeit of respect. In this, they were quintessential noncoms.

  Despite the fact that she was the only one on the base entrusted with 7708’s true name, Caitlin knew that the ground crew thought of the dragon as theirs rather than hers. Like all their kind, they distrusted pilots, who took their beautiful machines up and then, out of arrogance and carelessness, broke them, sometimes fatally. A select few pilots were accepted by their own ground crews—never those of other dragons—as worthy of the iron brute. It was Caitlin’s greatest pride to be one of that very small number.

  As Caitlin was walking away from her dragon, Ashling and Ysault fell into step with her, one to either side. “Tough luck there at the end,” Ysault said. “Just when things were looking easy-peasy.”

  Ashling gave Caitlin a one-armed hug. “Any landing you can walk away from, buddy.” Then she said, “Maeve found a butcher who knows how to prepare a proper Scythian lamb. So a few of us are going to have a roast up at the lake. We’ll go skinny-dipping and drink too much wine and sing songs. No guys, just gals. Are you in?”

  “Is it going to turn into a bitchfest about our mothers?”

  “Yes,” and, “Don’t they always?” the two pilots said simultaneously.

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  They all three laughed. Then Ashling said, “But don’t tell Saoirse about it. She’s not invited.”

  “Or Fiona,” Ysault said.

  “That doesn’t seem—”

  Ashling held up a hand to silence her. “She’s judgmental, she can’t hold her booze, she sings like a crow, and if you get naked in front of her she gets this strange look on her face. No Saoirse.”

  “And Fiona is a spaz and a pill,” Ysault added.

  “All right, all right, I get it.”

  “Goodsy-woodsy,” Ysault said. “We’ll give you the details later.” With mingled laughter like silver bells tinkling in a spring breeze, she and Ashling hurried off to deliver their invitation to another pilot.

  * * *

  Debriefing was held in a meeting room in the officers’ club, a lofty beam-frame building with black walls, red cedar shingles, and wide-horned gables. The exterior was decorated with swags of enormous gilded chains. Inside, in the shadows between the gold-trimmed rafters, hob-lanterns floated, illuminating many a war trophy: captured battle standards including nose art from a downed enemy dragon, the famed and tattered flag of Dunvegan, the sword Graywand, the skull of a basilisk. Tapestries hung on the walls depicted historic scenes from the Second Kentauroi War, the Conquest of Penthesilea, the Battle of Zhoulu, and the Siege of Mount Othrys.

  Swaggering ever so slightly, the pilots filed in and took their seats around a conference table. At its head sat Wing Commander Firedrake, looking placid and pleased with all of them. He raised a hand and silence fell over the room. He glanced at a sheet of paper. “This goes by negative seniority,” he said. “So that means the first to report is—you.” He looked straight at Caitlin.

  Fighting to maintain a façade of objectivity and professionalism, Caitlin went over the flight from takeoff to landing, omitting her confusion after exiting Dream Gate but not her dragon’s sudden recalcitrance nor the off-stride landing that snapped a strut in one leg. “Maintenance Officer Hogback informs me that he can have 7708 repaired, inspected, tested, and in the air within a day or two of receiving the parts,” she concluded. Not the slightest tremor of voice betrayed her emotional state, though by the time she was done, her armpits were damp with sweat.

  Flight Commander Quicksilver, who was sitting at the wing commander’s left hand, jotted something down on a yellow pad and without looking up said, “We’ll have a psychologist talk with your dragon; they’re not supposed to behave like that. And there’ll be an investigation. It will take ten days, maybe six if we fast-track it.” He looked up at his superior. “I recommend we fast-track it. I like to keep all my pilots in the air as much as possible.”

  “Agreed,” the wing commander said. “Next up is—”

  * * *

  When debriefing broke up, Flight Commander Quicksilver said, “Captain Caitlin of House Sans Merci, will you stay for a word?”

  Not trusting herself to speak, Caitlin merely nodded. The others trailed out. Then the room was empty save for the wing commander, the flight commander, and her. Oh, gods! Caitlin thought. Here it comes. Remember that, whatever the punishment, the only right response is No excuses, sir. She held herself straight and motionless—not quite at attention, but impeccably respectful.

  Firedrake nodded to Quicksilver, who cleared his throat. “You’ve been granted compassionate leave,” he said.

  “Compassionate—has somebody died?”

  Quicksilver looked puzzled. “Nobody told you? It’s your father. His time is on him.”

  Far in sea, west of Spain,

  Is a land they call Cockaygne;

  There is no land under heavenreich

  Of wealth, of goodness, is its like.

  Though Paradise be merry and bright,

  Cockaygne is of fairer sight.

  —Anonymous

  The drive to Château Sans Merci went down a long straight oak allée whose branches entwined overhead, forming a leafy green tunnel through woods that served a dual purpose of privacy buffer for the estate and game preserve for satyrs and fallow deer. There were winding trails in the forest and rock outcrops that harbored snakes and, on occasion, cave bears, and a lazily wandering river, just wide enough for a rowboat to navigate, named the Amberwine after its color during the spring floods. It had rained recently and the air smelled richly of moldering leaves, acorns, and truffles. Caitlin had b
een down this way a thousand times.

  “Driver,” she said. “Stop for a minute.”

  Caitlin got out, took a few steps away from the road, and threw up. When she was done, she tore a handful of leaves from a beech sapling and used them to wipe her mouth clean. Then she got back in the limo. Not long after, the woods parted like a curtain to introduce a broad vale, rich in meadows and dotted with the occasional birch copse.

  Château Sans Merci was situated in the fold of the valley where graceful hills shaped like a giantess’s thighs met in a bosky thicket. Against this verdant backdrop, the dome and orange roof tiles of the château gleamed in the sun. The formal gardens surrounding the manor house, Caitlin knew from experience, swarmed with dragonflies, humblebees, fairies, and wasps. Not far below, the Amberwine emptied into a small artificial lake with a marble shrine to Astarte at the upper end and a decorative mill at the bottom. There was a dock on one side of the lake and a red lacquered moon bridge on the other giving access to a modest wooded island that the family used for picnics and the occasional midnight tryst.

  It was the pleasantest aspect imaginable. Caitlin had to blink away tears—not of pleasure—at the sight of it.

  Minutes later, they arrived at the château. Caitlin saw that Fingolfinrhod was waiting to greet her. Caitlin’s half brother stood at the top of a short flight of six stairs to the upper yard. Tall, improbably beautiful, and blessed with an inherent melancholy that made him catnip to predatory women, he managed to look as if he were slouched against the bole of a nonexistent tree.

  While the chauffeur fetched her luggage, Fingolfinrhod drifted down the marble steps with that impossible-to-counterfeit high-elven grace possessed by all the family but Caitlin. She got out of the car. She was wearing her dress blues and by force of habit her posture was straight and her face expressionless.

  Caitlin was hesitating over whether to hug her brother or offer her hand when Fingolfinrhod bent low, seized her by the waist, and spun her around in the air. He kissed her on the lips and then, laughing, set her back down on the ground. Laughing in her own turn, Caitlin punched his shoulder. “Roddie, you asshole! Is that any way to greet an officer and a lady in Her Absent Majesty’s Dragon Corps?”

  “Oh, please. As if this place weren’t stuffy enough.”

  “Have the bags taken to my room,” Caitlin told the chauffeur. Then, keeping her tone casual, she said, “I see that Mother decided not to welcome me home.”

  “Let’s go someplace quiet where we can talk. The library, perhaps. Since Father took to his chair, nobody ever goes there.” Fingolfinrhod took Caitlin’s arm in his. They went into the house not by the front entrance but through the conservatory (unseen hands closing the doors behind them) and from there up the east staircase. “The Dowager has grown crueler, of course, the way they do at her age. You mustn’t expect even the most perfunctory pretense of courtesy from her anymore.”

  “The Dowager?”

  “That’s what you must call Mother now. She’s always been very particular about titles.”

  Caitlin felt the icy touch of dread. “Then I … came too late?”

  “What? Oh, you think that—oh, no, no, no, even now, with hired banshees disturbing the peace every third hour upon the hour, it’s hard to imagine Lord Sans Merci departing on anybody’s timetable but his own. Old Unkillable, the servants have taken to calling him. He’s been most adamantly awaiting you, though only the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky know why.”

  “Then shouldn’t we—?”

  Fingolfinrhod made a rude face. “He’s waited this long, he can wait a little more.”

  They climbed in silence to the top floor. At the landing, Fingolfinrhod said, “Word has it that you’re being slutted out of the Corps.”

  “My dragon came down off-stride and required minor repairs. That triggered a mandatory investigation which, as a matter of routine, will absolve me of any fault. That’s all. However did you come to know about it, though?”

  “Oh…” Fingolfinrhod shrugged. “One hears things, you know.”

  Her half brother in the lead, they trekked down long passageways smelling of furniture polish, thyme, and dried rose petals (sconces were lit before them and the candles snuffed out after they had passed) into the heart of the mansion. “Do you remember the time we went out to the woods at twilight and I tried to talk you into taking off your clothes in order to lure a unicorn into coming to lay its head in your lap?” Fingolfinrhod asked.

  “Oh, dear gods! You had a long ash spear you were going to kill it with and said I could keep the trophy head in my room. I was actually unbuttoning my blouse when I saw that smirk of yours peeking out from the corner of your mouth.”

  “Damn my guileless face,” Fingolfinrhod said, smirking. “It’s cost me ever so much at the casinos.”

  “I should have staked you out—you were every bit as innocent as me.”

  “Yes, well, a lot of bodies have floated under the bridge since that day. Though if a hand job counts, not even then.” They came to the library and Fingolfinrhod threw open the doors for Caitlin, unleashing a wash of old-book smell compounded of lignin, vanillin, and nostalgia, the scent of antique culture burning in the slow bonfire of time.

  The bottom level of the library was square and the upper one hemispherical with a gallery running around its edge. Two frosted glass spheres floated in the dome, casting light on a row of ivory reading tables arranged in gap-toothed fashion on the ground floor. Books thronged the shelves that covered all the walls, most of them leather-bound, some held together by string or thick rubber bands grown brittle with age. There were even shelves of books beneath the stairway to the gallery, though these had enough space between their backs and the wall for a girl to make an opening in the books and clamber through and into a private world of her own. There, for one long, lazy summer, Caitlin would settle down for hours at a time with a chosen volume, several pillows, a lantern made from a jar (with holes punched in the lid, of course) containing fresh-caught moon sprites, and, as often as not, an apple swiped from the walled orchard her mother thought no one but its mistress could enter. By autumn, inevitably, her hiding place had been discovered and a small cockatrice chained there to deprive her of its use. But for a season, it was bliss.

  “You were the apple thief?” Fingolfinrhod said when she told him this. “I am astonished. Mother always assumed it was me, but I was never able to get past the ward-spells on the gate. However did you manage it?” He ran a hand along a shelf of books, lips moving, as if he were counting.

  “There was a small window on the back wall with an iron grating that everyone assumed was locked. It wasn’t. Being half mortal, I don’t have a problem with cold iron and I could swing it open and shut. I was able to come and go as I wished.” Then, seeing that he wasn’t paying any attention to what she was saying, Caitlin asked, “Rod, what are you doing?”

  “It’s a surprise, pippin. Bear with me.” Fingolfinrhod’s fingers danced past a large red book with the word Henges in faded gilt lettering on its spine, tapped on three green volumes, came to a stop. “Ah!” He extracted a folio and flipped it open. In its center was a hollow space cut from the pages. Nestled within which was a round, flat stone with a hole in it just large enough to stick the tip of a pinky finger through. “I stole this from Father’s desk. Which should give you some idea of how far gone he is. It’s quite valuable. If you look through it, it’s a charm against glamour. I thought I’d use it to scope out my amours, paramours, and hemisemidemiamours. But by merest chance, I happened to glance this way and found a hidden door.”

  “The house is full of hidden doors.”

  “Not like this one.” Fingolfinrhod held the stone up to his eye and took a step toward the section of the library dealing with property law. The books parted for him. “Put your hand on my shoulder, sweetling.” With every step, they moved deeper into a dark passage. “You and she are the only two I ever loved. Well … Father too, a little, in recent years. H
e’s been likable enough lately, at any rate. Off and on.”

  “Roddie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Patience, ma puce.”

  They passed through a succession of attic lumber rooms that were jumbles of old furniture, darkness, and cobwebs. Unseen things skittered away at their approach. The ghost of an owl took wing and flew through a wall. Through dusty air and hot shadowy spaces they traveled, deeper into the gloom than Caitlin would have thought possible, until a slant of sun from an unexpected skylight revealed a bright red door no taller than her chest, flanked by a pair of lace-curtained windows with hearts cut out of their shutters. A fungus garden of mushrooms, some like white-flecked crimson ottomans and others like fleshy spears with pale cloche hats, grew within a clutter of terracotta pots to either side of the door. Gingerbread molding had been nailed to the wall in an inverted V to suggest a roofline.

  Fingolfinrhod knocked briskly.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  After a long silence, the door opened.

  A tiny woman with a face as brown as a dormouse, shoe-button eyes, and a halo of wispy white hair stood supported by a walker, blinking in the doorway. “Yes?”

  Caitlin fell to her knees at the sight of her. Even thus, she was taller than Nettlesweet Underwood had ever been. “Oh, Nettie, Nettie, I thought you were dead.”

  Nettlesweet had been Caitlin’s nanny and Fingolfinrhod’s before her. Bending forward, Caitlin enveloped her, walker and all, in an air hug, taking care not to put the least pressure on her bird-delicate bones. She did not cry, though anyone lacking her childhood training and military discipline would have.

  “You’ve grown so big,” Nettlesweet marveled, when Caitlin finally let her go. “As big as mountains.” Which was something Caitlin had never before been accused of being. Then, scoldingly, “Fin-fin! What are you two doing outside? Come in, come in, the both of you. I’ll make tea.”