Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  To live—by this—

  “See—see—” Etuk whispered on a silver breath.

  As if they’d never seen it before. Though it was a fact that few saw it and lived to view it again.

  Miles off, where the white snow hills marched away from the valley, sudden swirls of gleaming motion rose, like an unfrozen wave, luminous, indecipherable. If you didn’t recognize it.

  “Ulkioket.” The men sighed.

  Winter, thought Kulvok, they call him winter.

  And next, Why am I angry? Nothing has changed. For us, that’s his name now.

  But in spite of Ulkioket’s departure, the heart still thudded, and when the last quiver of light had faded behind the snows, he got up and ran on, towards the murdered village.

  THEY were scavengers, Nenkru’s band.

  Their sort had been given a general name among the many tribes: Kimolaki. Which meant Fox-Men, for the white fox was a coward and a thief, sneaking in to take the leavings of animals more powerful than itself. As did their tribe.

  How had they come to it?

  Kulvok did not care to recall. In the ordinary way, was the best answer. Because of poverty and death and dearth. And the winter. Always the winter, the ancient enemy of the Northlands. Anything really could be blamed on the winter, which crept up on the little time of summer that lasted only three months, burnt the last fruits black on the bushes, turned the sea to marble, and chained the sun to the horizon so that he never rose higher than one-eighth of the way up the enormous, sunken sky.

  At the start, they had simply been trying not to die. Most of mankind would instinctually do that, beastkind too, seals and fish, the wolves and the great bears.

  But then, instead of hiding or flying from death, from Ulkioket, they had come to see what might be gained.

  Since that sunpass when they learned this, Nenkru’s Kimolaki had seldom gone hungry, or gone without fire or shelter. Even clothing, even weapons they got. Even ornaments. What Ulkioket wrecked and left behind him so carelessly became of vast benefit to them. So now, like many other scavengers, Kulvok supposed, they said prayers to Ulkioket, put up little altars to him. Worshipped the filthy, foul, and fearsome nightmare thing.

  While the true gods and spirits of the North, Kulvok was certain, cursed them all and planned for them some terrible hell of suffering. And a worse one for himself, since he was a magician and should know better.

  But until he was dead, slain by the winter, or by Ulkioket, the monster named Winter, or merely by another man, Kulvok would not know what his punishment was to be.

  He glanced about him now as they sped on.

  He and they were all so alike, the same as all their race, their tall, lean bodies hard from hardship, bronzen-skinned from cold-burn, black-eyed and black of hair. In all his years, not one of them had ever seen a man or woman who was not physically like themselves.

  Yet why did Kulvok notice such a familiar thing now?

  Umb-umb, thrummed the heart. Umber-umber-umb.

  HE had been eight years old when he saw the dragon. As the son of the shaman’s first wife, Kulvok, instead of being let out to play with the other boys in the red winter moonlight, was sent to gather driftwood from an ocean inlet. His father had read weird signs in the magic firepot the night before, and must relight it to learn more, and only this particular type of wood, which gave off a blue flame, was of use.

  Kulvok was already trained to more work than play.

  That he had a talent for sorcery, he didn’t yet grasp. Yet he liked to study it. And liked his father well enough, too.

  He was alone along the frozen shore then, when he beheld for the very first time that uncanny metallic shimmer in the air.

  Not knowing what it could be, he stood staring up at the low ice-cliffs above the bay.

  The moon was over to the west, much redder, so that all which reflected its light had a coppery tone. Oddly, the metallic thing that moved between the cliff-top and the sky was more silver than red. It seemed to catch the reflection of the stars more than that of the moon.

  Kulvok had to make a decision. Should he continue gathering the important driftwood, as he’d been told to do, or instead climb back up the ice and rock to find out what moved there?

  He decided on the second course.

  In fact, it would have made no real difference either way. In the end, the same thing would have happened.

  By the time he had clambered out on the table of the cliff, the shining mystery had left it.

  Perplexed, eight-year-old Kulvok paused, looking around.

  That was when he noticed the marks.

  Even then, he had thought them beautiful, though he would not have admitted to the phenomenon in quite that way. They drew him. So he knelt to trace one with his gloved finger.

  It went without saying that the ice was freezing cold, and even through the sealskin of the glove he would have felt it—but this was more than that, far more. With a yelp, he snatched his hand away. And saw with horror that the tip of the glove had burned off and, under it, his fingertip was black—as if he had thrust it into a fire.

  Despite being accustomed to his father’s often dangerous craft, Kulvok was frightened.

  He sprang up, clutching his hand.

  And in that moment saw what was below, out of the shadow of the cliffs, full in the blood-red moonlight. His village, of course, lay on the ice-plain down there. Kulvok knew the sight of it well. He had been born there, grown up there. The curved walls of the white towers, one storey or two of ice-bricks, with smudges of cook-smoke rising. Inside, the house-wolves would be lying, waiting for the evening meal; the women would bend to the savoury-smelling stone pots slung over the flames; men would mend things, sitting in the central lower room, where the fretted stone lamps each lifted a yellow flame, two or three feet tall. On the wall skins hung down, with little whale-ivory images of kind or helpful gods fastened to them with pins of iron or bone. All this, Kulvok pictured in that glance. Perhaps foreknowing.

  He was at once aware, without consciously understanding what it was, that the other thing, which now moved between him and his world of light and warmth and safety, would end it instantly, like the smothering of a lamp.

  And he cried out, Kulvok, in his high child’s voice. But the whining wind ate his cry.

  The shape was beautiful too. Yet he could not bring himself to see it as anything beautiful, nor would he ever. Its hugeness he did comprehend. High as the low sky it looked, though it was not, for the cliffs stood higher. Moon red and dark and silvery, it eased sinuously forward, reflecting everything, almost like a misted silver mirror—or like the scales of black ice that armoured the winter bay. For it was ice, and scaled with ice, and the crest that stabbed out like flint spear-heads along its head and back and all the terrible yards of its eddying tail, they were ice also. And then it turned its head, just a little. And the child saw one of its eyes. Its huge eye—and this was almost more ghastly than all else—was like the eye of a man or woman. Yes, like that, a clear crystal white and an iris and pupil of pure inky blackness, and the eye was set into its long, wolf-like head, inside the same human, long, narrow lids that slanted at the outer corner.

  It was when he beheld the dragon’s eye that Kulvok fell to his knees. Not in worship. His legs had changed to liquid snow.

  And from that position then, kneeling and unable to run either forward or away, he watched what the dragon did next.

  WHEN they reached the village, all was as usual. That is, things were as they always became once Ulkioket had gone by.

  Long ago, any of Nenkru’s band might have missed the signs. But by now, they knew what to look for. These clues were various and not every time the same; sometimes there was something new. That happened now.

  On this occasion, it was an old woman, lying just outside the zone of attack. The blast had caught her, but despite killing her, had not disguised her. She was still visible: her heavy leather and fur garments, the necklace of shark-teeth, p
erhaps given her in youth by a loving husband. Her face, despite being sheathed in ice like the rest of her, was still quite plainly visible. She looked startled, that was all. As if some one had shouted behind her. The blast had turned her hair to iron. Frozen solid, one of her gloved fingers had broken right off when she hit the ground.

  Her broken-off finger made Kulvok remember his burned one. The scar was still there, covering his fingertip, grey and without any feeling.

  The village lay immediately beyond.

  If you knew what to look for, you could see.

  The hilly rubble of ice chunks that the place had become inside only two or three seconds was not quite natural-looking. And if much of it was milky white, so that you couldn’t peer through, in a few areas there were flaws in the milkiness, and there you could.

  So they looked in.

  The best vantage spot looked right into an ice-tower, for the blast, even as it froze everything, had also crack ed one wall wide open.

  The scene was perfect, eerily so, although veined over within with thicker ice like white feathers. Kulvok had never seen this exact and awful a presentation of ordinary life—a life that had been going on unawares only seconds before it was blasted into stillness.

  A man had been repairing his knife. Two small children were playing on a bearskin, beside two of the favourite wolves, one asleep and one who had been sitting bolt upright at the moment of impact. A woman was coming through from the cooking area, carrying a pot of fish soup. The only elements that were wrong were the stiffness of clothes and hair and skin—each of the victims had instantly been changed from flesh and blood to a carved statue. And there was no light, save from the twilight of afternoon. No three-foot flame in the lamps, no shine in a single human eye.

  “I shall never grow used to it,” said Nenkru dully. Apla chuckled, and said, “I’ll settle for warming that soup.”

  And Etuk added, “He was good to us this time, our Lord Winter. See those heavy furs? And the dried seal-meat on the hooks there?”

  But the man behind Kulvok, Inoro, muttered, “One sun pass in the future, they’ll go away. Ulkioket and his kind. And then the winter will go too. There will be twelve months of summer, and only a night or so of cold.”

  “Hush, fool,” growled Etuk, and cuffed Inoro. “Do you want to spoil our luck? It’s more likely the winter will grow stronger and devour us all.”

  Then they took their axes and began to hack at the more-fragile areas in the blast-ice.

  Kulvok stood back.

  He wondered how he had heard any of this exchange, and how he could even hear the blows and shatterings of the axe blades over the heartbeat that now thundered so violently in his skull.

  It came to him that this noise possibly meant he was going mad, because every time he saw these frozen villages, his birth village of ten years before filled his mind. And since the scene in this one snow-tower was so clear, it reminded even more acutely. He had not, that earlier time when he was eight, been the only one away from home. Some men of his tribe had been hunting along the ice, and when they came back, they found Kulvok. And then they found their frozen village.

  None of them had known what had caused this horror, and for a while Kulvok had been unable to speak. They blamed the glassy ice-death on some new freak of the winter, and one of them had begun to scream an old song of the tribe about the enemy tyrant that winter was. But someone shook him and brought him round. Then they too had tried to hack a way through into the ice. It was difficult, and they had only two axes with them, one of which snapped head from haft. Then they lit a fire against the ice, and kept it fierce until the sun crawled up one-eighth of the sky. Eventually, a little of the outer shell melted, and then they were able to go in a short distance. But not far. At the last, they had not the heart to go in far.

  But Kulvok had glimpsed his father, the shaman. The most surprising horror of all then. Since the man had gone down at the blast, as some did, he had been toppling over, but had frozen in midfall. He lay sidelong and tilted, his black hair fanned out in stiffened quills, his staff of magic in his hand and his eyes dead as two bits of charred wood. Like these eyes now, in the latest village Ulkioket had visited.

  KULVOK the child went away with the hunters who found him. They trekked for seventeen sunpasses and came to another village, one that was still alive. This place took them in generously and without question. You did not refuse to shelter any of those the winter had hurt, for there might come an hour when you also would need help.

  They were very kind to little Kulvok. In the warmth among the furs and wolves, the scent of food and humanity, all lit by lamps and fires, he regained the power of speech. And then was able to tell what he alone had seen. The dragon. For which he had no name, and that he could barely describe, only able to talk of its unearthly scintillance, and that mostly because sometimes the winter sky, by night, produced such colors and phantom shifts of light, and that gave him the words to use.

  But the people of the new village believed what he said.

  They had heard before of what Kulvok spoke. A huge animal that moved on four legs and had a head like a wolf’s, and a crest of spines, and a coiling summer-river of tail. One man said that he had known another who saw the thing at higher-sun time, near winter’s end. Then it was white, with a leaden bluish glimmer of the sky on it. It reflected the sky, for truly it was all polished ice, plated with ice like the winter sea. And it had black, human eyes. The man also said that there were several others of its kind. He said nothing of what they did to men.

  Kulvok lived four years in the village and became a man himself there. He learned to train the wolf-teams and to sled with them, to hunt and summer-fish. He relearned his magic talents too, with the village’s sorcerer. For a great while, whenever he was away, he was afraid that he would come back to find the village assaulted and frozen over. But the years passed, and it did not happen. He pushed the dread from his mind. Yet at eight he had seen what the ice dragon had done, and how it had done it. Seen how, after it had half turned its head and he had beheld its human eye, it had looked back again at Kulvok’s birth village. And then it had drawn in a breath. That was unmistakable, the swelling up of its sides—like the leather bellows the women sometimes puffed to encourage wood on the hearth to burn. And he heard it breathe in, even over the wind that was blowing that night, a hissing like fire. Breathe in. Then out. Unlike the bellows, its breath was not air, nor fire. Its breath was ice. Its breath blew from the gut of winter. Its breath had frozen the village and all things in it. And, having done that, the dragon rippled itself away over the plain and vanished in the dark of the sinking moon.

  WHEN his constant fear that his adoptive village would be frozen by Ulkioket or another of the ice dragons lessened, which it did as nothing like that happened, Kulvok, now a man of twelve, questioned the sorcerer on the matter. He asked why the ice dragon hated men so much.

  “Because the dragon’s master is winter itself, who is our enemy, and with which always we battle.”

  “Why do we not then battle with the dragon?” twelve-year-old Kulvok had demanded.

  “Even a shaman must fail at that. Even the mightiest of magicians.”

  There were stories of heroes though—Kulvok had heard them round the fires at night.

  “Why not a hero then? One who can slay the great white bear, or kill twenty walruses, or ride the whale?”

  “Even a hero fails. It’s not, Kulvok, that no hero has ever gone up against an ice dragon. It’s that we are men, and winter is eternally our war, and the ice dragon is winter’s servant and the same. Flesh and blood will never outlast the ice. It swallows us. Any hero, and once there were many, who fought a dragon—died. One breath. One breath of ice. That is all it took. I’ve not seen what you have seen, Kulvok. Think what you have seen. One breath of ice.”

  When he was almost thirteen, and had been out hunting with his sled, Kulvok came home happy and fearless and thoughtless one evening, looking forward to se
eing a girl he liked, and with meat for his adopted village. And found that it was gone. Gone in a breath of ice, just like his birthplace, frozen, and everyone there frozen with it, even the hunters who now lived there and had rescued him as a child.

  And some years later, he met with Nenkru and Apla. And by then, Kulvok was corrupted, a shaman who did tricks to amuse and earned his food that way. A shaman who did not bother to heal or foretell, did not love or trust. Having learned what happened when you did.

  UMBER-UMB … Umb-umber…

  The heart beat now in his brain. In his viscera. In his heart.

  He staggered into the cleared space. He could see, from a spirit totem carved on a bone post, that the people in this village had been from the tribe of Lut. His people, in the past—they were the tribe of Taind. Nothing of that mattered now.

  Smashed ice everywhere. He stumbled again. None of the others were near. He ran, disjointedly, ahead. Kulvok could hardly see for the beat of the other heart in his head.

  He floundered against ice-walls, over the frozen corpse of a wolf, a boy—

  And then—then—Umber-umber—then—

  Suddenly the beat of the alien heart faded. It grew quiet, so that he could hear it only as if it was miles away, as he had in the beginning.

  In this way he knew, or his shamanic skill knew, that it was directly by him.

  He had reached more solid blast-ice, where the axes had not yet come. Behind him, Kulvok made out the shouts of Nenkru and the others as they broke into the village ice-towers, pulling the furs and food from the walls, the weapons and decorations from the belts and neck-strings of the dead. “Gold!” he heard Etuk call in joy. For the old metals, once mined when summer had been longer and men had had strength enough to delve the earth, were rare now.

  Sickened by the scavenging, and by his part in it, Kulvok leaned against the side of a dwelling. And saw a woman’s foot, booted in walrus-hide and fur, just clear of the unbreached thickness of the blast-ice ahead.