The Iron Dragon’s Mother

by Michael Swanwick

  Caitlin crouched over to enter Nettie’s room, ducking her head under the lintel. Fingolfinrhod bent low and folded himself through the door, an act somewhere between contortionism and origami. The chairs being too small for them, they sat on the rug, Fingolfinrhod all legs and elbows and Caitlin leaning on one arm, knees together, an imaginary skirt such as she used to wear spread neatly about her.

  Over cookies and tea, Nettlesweet said, “You’re returned just as Fin-fin promised. Oh, this is a happy day!” Her smile was as warm as honey in sunlight. “Look at us. We’re having a happy ending, just like in the storybooks. You had such a sad childhood.” (Caitlin shook her head, not meaning it.) “I used to say I would steal you away so we could live like mongrel feys in a hole in an oak deep in the woods, dining on dew and acorns, and now it’s almost come true.”

  “I don’t remember your promising to steal me away,” Caitlin said.

  “Oh, not you, Katiboo. You were such a happy child! No, I’m talking about poor little Fin-fin. He was so very, very lonely.”

  It had never occurred to Caitlin before that her half brother’s childhood might have been more painful than her own. Learning it now felt like one more thing had been taken away from her and given to him. She remembered how, time after time, from high spirits she had always thought, Fingolfinrhod had run away from home. Once he had run away barefooted. “Why?” she had asked afterward. “To prevent my shoes from telling on me, of course,” he’d replied. Caitlin had pointed out the futility of this stratagem when every rock and tree on the estate had been enchanted to tell any searchers which way he had gone. So he had snatched the doll she was playing with and flung it into the frog pond. The water had done something to Miss Soppit so that she cried at night and no amount of cuddling would silence her until at last Caitlin had buried her in a trunk full of old clothing in an attic lumber room, to sob unheard until her damaged ensorcellment wore off.

  They three talked for hours about matters of little consequence until the excitement gave Nettlesweet a headache and she had to retire to a dark room and “lie down with a damp cloth over my face,” she said, as she always had whenever she felt the need to partake in a ladylike glass of laudanum.

  On which note, their afternoon ended.

  On the way to her room, Caitlin said wonderingly, “Is it possible?” On the day her nanny had disappeared, Father announced that she’d retired to an upcountry farm whose address Caitlin had never been able to wheedle out of him. “Has Nettie really been living in the attic all these years?”

  “Oh, yes. The Dowager placed a geas on her never to leave the room and had a glamour cast over the passage so that you and I wouldn’t find it. But, awful as she is, you mustn’t blame her for that,” Fingolfinrhod said. “All the most advanced child-rearing theory had it that strong attachments to toys or servants were bad. The dreadful old thing was only doing what she thought was right.”

  * * *

  They passed back through the château (doors opening before and closing behind them), down the main stairs which Caitlin had never been allowed to use as a child, through cascading flights of orchids and jungle vines with here a glimpsed waterfall and there a coral-colored snake, to the second floor (more sconces being lit before them and snuffed out after they had passed), where Fingolfinrhod turned to the left and she to the right to dress for dinner. At the end of a long hallway was the room she had grown up in. It would have taken a connoisseur’s eye to detect how second-rate everything in it was, compared to the furnishings of the rest of the house. But Caitlin had been brought up to know the difference.

  A dress not far inferior to what the Dowager would be wearing had been laid out upon the bed for her. Caitlin changed into it. She unlocked the jewelry cabinet with a touch of one finger and began sorting through brooches, bracelets, and tiaras, almost all of them no longer suitable for a woman her age. Then she saw the Cartier watch—a white gold Tank Américaine—that Father had given her upon her acceptance into the Academy. Whether by intent or accident, it was the only time she had ever been given something without Rod simultaneously receiving a present significantly more expensive.

  When she picked it up, the link she had been meaning to have fixed ever since the time Fingolfinrhod, braying like a donkey, had snatched the watch from her hand and forced it onto his own wrist brought up with it a miniature chair.

  Caitlin untangled the two. The chair was just the right size for a mouse to sit in, if mice were only bipeds and capable of creating so cunning a thing. The chair had been crafted from the wire cage for a champagne cork with the foil cap reversed and fitted with an embroidered silk seat-cushion stuffed with dandelion fluff. It had been made by a thumbling, of course, one of the tiny parasitic race that lived inside the walls of mansions such as this, scavenging the gleanings and discards of what were to them titans.

  When Caitlin was little, she had been fascinated by the thumblings and would leave crumbs of cake out for them at the base of the wainscoting. She’d fantasized that one day she would befriend one. But except for a rare glimpse and the occasional suspicious loss of a comb or a minor diamond pried from a ring left out on a nightstand (“You should have kept it locked away; what do you think the jewelry cabinet is for?” Lady Sans Merci had said), they were fleet and fugitive. Occasionally she would hear one of them scurrying inside the walls, a sound like pebbles falling. The cake crumbs turned hard and were cleaned away by servants.

  Then, one day in early adolescence, when Caitlin was undressing for bed, a tiny movement in the corner of her eye caused her to spin around. There on her makeup table, sitting on a chair he had clearly brought with him, was a well-made young male thumbling, looking directly at her. His breeches were undone and his hands were in his lap. He was jerking off.

  She threw a slipper at the creature with such force that, had he not vanished into the woodwork before its arrival, it would surely have killed him. Then, still angry and hoping his wee parents would punish him for the loss, she tossed the chair into the cabinet and locked it away. She undressed in the dark after that, and continued to do so long after her mother had exterminators in to gas them all.

  Caitlin tucked the watch into a suitcase. She would have it repaired when she got back to base.

  At that moment, six near-simultaneous screams, louder than shrieks and less dulcet than disaster-warning sirens, shattered the air, causing Caitlin to clap hands to ears and the walls to waver like curtains in a sudden wind.

  The banshees, of course.

  Silence returned. And in that silence a bell rang, summoning the family to dinner.

  * * *

  The Dowager Sans Merci glided into the room without so much as a glance at either Caitlin or her son. She was regally tall and imperially slim. She was also old, there was no denying that, but her face in age had taken on the mystique of a civilization lost in time and known only by rumor. She sat at the table and they followed suit. Unseen hands poured wine.

  “So,” the Dowager said at last. “You’ve come home to kill your father.”

  “Mother, you whore,” Fingolfinrhod said. “There was absolutely no excuse. None at all.” Then, speaking over his shoulder, “Are there any more of those biscuits?”

  His plate was replenished.

  The Dowager’s face went as white as a carnival mask, but her voice was pleasant as she said, “So you’re a master of manners now? Then you’d know that the truth never needs an excuse. Lord Sans Merci holds off the inevitable only because he wishes to speak to your sister, though only the Seven know why. She might as well have come home wearing a black cowl and carrying a scythe. Caitlin, you haven’t touched your soup.”

  “Yes, I have. It’s quite good, Fata Sans Merci.”

  “Don’t contradict your mother, dear. It causes wrinkles. And you must address me as Dowager Sans Merci.”

  “Yes, Rod told me. My apologies, Dowager.” Over the years, Caitlin had learned that the best way to deal with her mother was to keep her head down and her
words bland.

  When the soup was done and whisked away, a plump roast spider appeared on a platter. Servitors snapped legs to extract the marrow, cut thin slices from the abdomen, and deftly carved out the cheeks from the cephalothorax. The eyes, a particular weakness of the Dowager’s, were deposited on her plate.

  “Did Caitlin tell you she soloed her first mission? If that’s the correct terminology, I’m not at all sure. I personally am far too useless to know anything for sure.” Fingolfinrhod took a bite of spider meat.

  His fork clattered to the floor.

  All in a flash, Fingolfinrhod leapt to his feet, snatched up Caitlin’s as yet untasted meal, and threw the plate against the wall, where it shattered into a hundred pieces. Glaring at his mother with an expression of absolute hatred, he said, “This is a poisonous spider!”

  “That never bothered you before,” the Dowager said.

  “Of course not, I’m immune. We’re talking about Caitlin. One bite would have made her sick as a mandrake.”

  “Pish. Were there anything wrong with the food, I am certain the servants would have notified her.”

  Caitlin folded her napkin next to her plate and made sure the silverware was aligned with the china. “I’ll just go to my room.”

  “Stay,” her mother said.

  “You know good and well that you had a glamour put on the household staff so that Caitlin could neither see nor hear them! She doesn’t even know their names.” Fingolfinrhod’s face was red with emotion. He never had known, Caitlin reflected, how to handle their mother; or, rather, he knew but only on an intellectual level. She noted how shakily he picked up a water glass as he tried to master his emotions.

  The Dowager produced a smile utterly devoid of warmth. “Familiarity breeds licentiousness. Given the opportunity, I am certain that the little trollop would have been romping with the help every bit as enthusiastically as you did. In a male heir, this is only to be expected. However, with Caitlin, being what she is, it would have negated what little value she possesses. So, really, she should be grateful.”

  The glass exploded in Fingolfinrhod’s hand. Fat drops of blood spattered on the lace tablecloth. He jabbed a long, white finger at the Dowager’s nose. “The day is coming—and fast!—when I will be the Sans Merci of House Sans Merci and you, Mother, will then be answerable to me. Consider that. Consider it very carefully indeed. There are going to be some changes made around here and they will happen sooner than you like.”

  “Gammon and spinnage, young lordling. Nothing ever changes. You will always be my chubby little baby boy. Forever. That fact, shout and scream and struggle though you will, cannot be altered.” With all the slow grace of a glacier sliding into the sea, the Dowager rose from her chair. The napkin that fell from her lap was snatched from the air by an unseen hand and disappeared. At the door, she paused to say over her shoulder, “If you don’t like the meal, you can always have the kitchen staff make you sandwiches.”

  * * *

  “Well,” Caitlin said, when their mother was gone. “That went better than I expected.” The sad fact was that, attempted poisoning and all, it was true.

  Fingolfinrhod turned to face the wall. After a long silence, he said, “Shall we go see Father?”

  “Now, you mean?”

  “It’s what you came here for. We might as well get it over with.”

  The Autumn Room, which their father had made his office, was on the lower ground floor, accessible only from the back of the house; there were no stairs connecting it to the upper ground floor, which was entered from the front. From the lower foyer, which was black marble to contrast with the upper foyer’s white, had amber lights to the upper floor’s mother-of-pearl, and was scented with roses rather than lilies, they passed through an undistinguished side door and down the winding wooden passageway that led to his collection.

  Lord Sans Merci had been possessed by a strange obsession with sunken cities and had gathered building façades from a score of such places, and set kobold workmen to stitching them together on either side of a cobblestoned Atlantean street salvaged from the Dogger Bank. They entered through a Moorish gate from an alcazar in Tartessos into a space smelling of marsh sulfur and sea salt. On their left was a manor house from Veneta and on their right a wooden guildhall of Saeftinghe. Then came a fishmonger’s storefront (Lord Sans Merci being not entirely without whimsy) from Dvārakā whose windows stared in astonishment at a Lyonesse farmhouse standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a log mansion from Bolshoy Kitezh, a hostel from Kumari Kandam confronting a Lion City noodle shop, and so on and on, Rungholt in brotherly opposition to Eidum, Atil-Khazaran across from Olous, Pavlopetri from Port Royal, Pheia from Thonis Heracleion, interspersed with others of more obscure provenance until the road came to a stop at the dread lord’s office door.

  As a girl, Caitlin had been fascinated by the windows of the houses, through whose lace curtains or oiled-paper blinds could sometimes be glimpsed shadowy figures about their cryptic otherworldly businesses. Fingolfinrhod, by contrast, never failed to try all the doors, apparently convinced that someday he would find one unlocked and so make an escape.

  There was an uneasiness in the air today, a sense that the wards protecting them from the ocean waters on the far sides of the building façades were not as strong as usual. The doors looked ready to burst open, the windows to explode outward. A tentacle brushed against several panes and was gone too swiftly for Caitlin to be sure it was not a fluttering curtain. She felt a twinge of sadness to see her half brother walk by with not a glance. Lagging behind a pace, she said, “Are you sure he hasn’t … gone before?”

  “Oh, he’s here,” Fingolfinrhod said glumly. Without knocking, he threw open the door to their father’s office.

  The windows that filled the far wall were covered with heavy burgundy drapes. The garden outside this one room existed in perpetual autumn, with a somber light playing upon its dying vegetation and red and gold leaves dancing in the air. It required some very expensive magic to arrange such a thing and an even loftier arrogance to ignore it completely thereafter. Lord Sans Merci sat motionless in his chair, his back to the curtains that Caitlin had never seen opened. He wore a gray suit with matching tie. His skin was so pale that it seemed to glow in the darkness. Or so Caitlin thought, until she realized that a cold luminescence was expressing itself from deep within his flesh.

  As a child, Caitlin had always hesitated at the threshold of her father’s office. So, too, now. Fingolfinrhod, however, walked right in and said, “Father? She’s here. You may cease your navel-gazing now, if you deign.”

  Lord Sans Merci’s head turned blindly toward his son. The old martinet had a kindly cast to his face now, and Caitlin found herself resenting that as well.

  “Ah,” the old patriarch said. “I knew there was something I had yet to do.”

  Caitlin knelt at her father’s feet, as so many times before, though now without fear that he would strike her. “I am here, Father, as you commanded.”

  “Yes.” A faltering hand touched the top of her head in blessing, lingered, left. “Stand. I had something to say to you. But now … I wonder if there’s any point. I…” His voice dwindled to nothing and the light within him grew stronger, so that he began to dissolve into it.

  “Oh, that’s just perfect.” Fingolfinrhod put his hands on Caitlin’s shoulders and pushed her back a step. “I’ll need a little space for this.”

  He slapped his father’s face so hard it sounded like a gunshot. “Hey! Captain Senile! Wake up!”

  The room darkening, Lord Sans Merci rose to his feet. His eyes flashed with anger. He lifted his chin, mouth grim, and for an instant was again the fell elf-warrior he had been in his youth. Then he laughed. “You have neither mercy nor pity in you, my son. I taught you well.”

  “By example, at any rate.”

  Turning to Caitlin, Lord Sans Merci said, “I am not long for this world, daughter. Before I go, I have an explanation for the both of you and a gift
for each alone. First, Caitlin’s bequest.” He bent down and, placing his mouth by her ear, whispered, “When you die, you’ll find yourself standing in a fair lea with short green grass dotted with white flowers. There will be a stormy gray sky overhead with no sun. Nor will there be any shadows. Before you will lie a path, which you will have no choice but to follow. It leads to the Black Stone, which is an avatar of the Goddess in the form of a menhir. You may address her if you wish, but she will not answer. There, the path branches. The left-hand way is well-trodden, for that is how most go. But if you look closely, you will see that there is a faint pathway to the right. You’re of the second blood, so you can go either way. If you go to the left, you will be reborn again. But if you pass to the right…” He drew away from her.

  “Yes?” Caitlin said. “What happens then?”

  No longer whispering, the ancient elf-lord said, “No one knows.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “It is more than enough. Next. I have never justified myself to anyone in my life but it seems that even in my last hour, there are new experiences. For now I must explain why I gave you life.”

  “Eh?” Fingolfinrhod said.

  “I do not think it will surprise either of you to learn that your mother disapproved of my siring a half mortal. The practice is customarily employed by lesser houses as a means of increasing their prestige. In our case, by looking as if I might want to increase our prestige, I achieved the exact opposite. But what of that? I wanted a child who would someday escape this horrible place. Just as one might buy a songbird in the goblin market only for the pleasure of releasing it and watching it fly away.”

  “I have, Father,” Caitlin said fervently. “I have a career now, and a future, and I’m grateful to you for that.”

  “Your gratitude is irrelevant. I did it for my son.”