Shadowheart

by Laura Kinsale

  They did not speak to each other beyond necessity. Although the hunt had seemed to Melanthe to have created some momentary degree of intimacy, softening the edge of awkwardness between them, he had stung her with his suspicions. She supposed that she would not look him out a wife after all.

  His mail chinked in a rhythm that worked its way into her brain in the hours of silent march. The horse’s hoofbeats changed from soft thumps to thuds as the marshland rose to higher ground. Meadow gave way to open woods, gray and black, straight young birch trees like a thousand cathedral columns springing up from a strange undulating floor of hawthorns and green winter grass.

  "Tilled field," he said, breaking the quiet. He gestured with his mailed hand to the furrows and edges that spread like huge ripples in the earth, the massive ghosts of peasants’ plows, birch trunks growing out of the spines and hollows.

  "Mary," Melanthe said softly. "Abandoned?"

  "Yea. Twenty year and more, hap, on measure of the trees."

  "The Death."

  "Yea, my lady. Was never a much peopled place, I think. What souls were left—" He shrugged. "Why keep it, when they mayen find better livelihood to the east, where men were wanted to worken easier lands?"

  She nodded. So it had been everywhere, the marginal surrendered to desert when there were barely enough people to till the richest fields. She had been nine years old. Her mother had died and left Melanthe and her little brother, Richard. Her father had wept, and never married again, nor smiled as gaily—and wept once more a few years later when Melanthe set out for Italy in the rich train Prince Ligurio had sent for her.

  She had never seen her father after that day. But he had remembered her. He had not blamed her for Richard’s death. In his will he had confirmed her as the heiress of Bowland. She could not recall his face—Richard’s boyish grin intruded, Richard of the fond smiles and songs for the ladies. In the few months that Melanthe had kept him with her, she had basked in those smiles. She had loved him so easily, known him so surely, as if they had never been parted.

  Another life. Other places.

  She had been afraid. She had always been afraid, every minute, every hour of eighteen years since she had left home.

  She felt a fierce will that the plague might kill them all, Navona and Riata, while she sojourned here in isolation and wildness. Haps she would never return, not even to Bowland. She and her knight would hunt dragons and battle wildmen of the woods, and never go back to the world of human things.

  Here was nothing but peace, that she could see, and what danger there might be was her knight’s charge and not her own. She wanted peace. Even more than she wanted Bowland.

  She gazed at the silent English woods. When he had first told her what the peculiar ridges were, she had felt a quick superstitious dread of such eerie signs of long-dead men. But as she looked on them now, they seemed to signify the weakness of human power in this place, where trees grew without effort from the heart of men’s hardest labor.

  "In such remote desert we moten find us a damsel in sore straits, Green Sire, and rescue her," she said.

  "We moten find us safe haven, lady," he said, pulling the horse on.

  Melanthe picked up her skirt and came abreast of him. They climbed up a plow ridge and went down the side. "Nay—a damsel, passing fair, and in distress."

  "Full enow in distress is my lady, I trove. We need none other."

  She tugged her skirt free of a thorn bush. "Alack, sir, art thou satisfied with such a small aventure? Where is our venomous serpent? Our fiery worm?"

  "Ne does nought my lady wish to meet a dragon, in troth."

  "Thou woundest me! I do."

  He shook his head. "Ye knows nought of what you say."

  She looked toward him, intrigued by the note of certainty in his voice. "Hast thou seen one?"

  "Yea, my lady."

  He said it in the same dispassionate tone that he might have said he thought it like to come on rain. Melanthe pursed her lips. "Thou wilt not fool me, Sir Ruck. My husband said that all such beasts were drowned in the Deluge."

  He gave a faint snort and glanced at her. "I thought I heard my lady say that she wished to war with one such."

  "Tush, I am but a woman," she said lightly, "full of a woman’s fantasies."

  "Oho," he said, and nothing more.

  They walked along in silence. Melanthe freed herself from another thorn.

  She listened to the steady chink of his mail. They went up one side of the ridges and down the other, up and down and up and down again. She slanted him a sideways look.

  "So, knight—where didst thou beholden this dragon?"

  He nodded in the direction that they walked. "To the north. Not far from here."

  "Fye upon thee! Thou undertake to frighten me!"

  "Hah! My lady hatz no proper dread, nought of wolves nor outlaws. Wherefore should I wist a firedrake might make you shrink?"

  "No firedrake abides in Britain yet," she insisted. "My husband said me so. They are now all in Ethiopis and India and hot places."

  He walked steadily onward. "Haps I slayed the last one," he said. "Haps it were nought the last, though I’ve seen none since. I ne wit that your lord husband could know so much of it, lest he spent the years that I haf done in the hunting of the beasts."

  "He read deeply. It may be that thou wast mistaken in what animal thou slayed. ’Tis said the likeness of a dragon can be forged on the carcass of a great ray."

  He halted and turned with an exclamation of disgust. "It were nought a fish!"

  Melanthe stopped, facing him, her curiosity fully roused. "Descrive it me."

  "N’ill I," he said, turning to go on.

  She put her hand on his arm. "Sir Ruck, if it thee like and please," she said, with her best coaxing grace, "tell me of thy dragon that thou slayed."

  He began to walk. But he glanced aside at her and did not pull away from her touch. "It was in a hard winter," he said. "The bulls came and bears, and boars from the high fells. Only a man outlawed would occupy such a wasted place as this. But the warring did nought wrathe me as the winter, so much. Shed the clouds sleet, and I sleeped, my lady, on the raw rocks, rigged in my arms, with hard icicles henged over my head like serpents’ teeth. It was too terrible to say a tenth of it." He nodded toward the grass that carpeted the undulating forest floor. "Nought as now."

  "But say me of the dragon." She walked beside him, balancing on the top of a ridge while he went in the furrow, her hand resting on his shoulder. "How did it appear?"

  "My lady, if ye would discover what manner of beast it was, then would ye nought knowen its habitation, and what weather likes it? So I am telling you."

  "Ah. I crave thy pardon. The winter was a harsh one, then, that drove the wild creatures down from the hills. Dragons, I’ve read in the beastiaries, dwell in sweltery places."

  "Swelter did I nought, my lady, that eventide. For harbor I halted in a hollow below cliff, where the stones sloped down perilous steep. I fettered Hawk, to forage for his fodder, could he finden it, but I broke nought e’en hard bread to brace me. Black night befell us, of all brightness wanting." He stared ahead as he walked, his eyes narrowing, as if he could see it. "Thus in pain and plight full unpleasant in troth, I dropped down as were dead and lifeless, but that I shivered and shooken, sore with cold."

  Melanthe pulled her mantle closer about her as they came to the end of the curving ridge. At the base of it a tumbled wall of stone was succumbing to hawthorn, and beyond that the furrows lay perpendicular to those they traversed. He turned along the wall, taking Melanthe’s arm and prompting her to walk before him down the trench.

  "Weary sleep shunned me, I say you, my lady. Blew aghlich airs out of that black atmosphere, tolling awful tunes to terrify a hunter." A freshening breeze swept the bare branches above. He raised his eyes, watching them. "I believe it was the breath of the beast."

  Melanthe glanced up. The shadow of new clouds raced across the woods, throwing a chill int
o the wind. At her feet she realized there was a subtle dirt track in the bottom of the furrow, as if theirs were not the only feet that passed this way.

  "Were there lightnings?" she asked. "Haps it were an unseasonal storm, far off."

  "Yea, there were lightnings, my lady," he said from behind her. "Lightnings and luminaries as the long hours passed. My bed of boulders grew to burn me. Sat I straight up, with my skin blistering, smarted by hot steel where skimmed my armor. And I heard then a hiss, my lady, so hideous and vast that my heart haled to the heels of my feet."

  "The wind might make such a noise."

  "Came it out of the cliff, from a cavern deep, and a wind with it as you wis, my lady, wrothly reeking."

  "Of burning brimstone, I trove?"

  "Nay—" He paused, and then said thoughtfully, "More like to the smell of a siege in the summer heat—when the bodies of the dead grow bloated and burn with the sack of the city."

  "By God’s self," Melanthe murmured. "How pleasant."

  "My lady has read of some beast with such a breath?" he asked.

  "Several might have such," she said. "A manticore, a griffin. They are found in Ethiopis. The basilisk of India may kill by no more than its smell."

  "Ne slayed by the scent of this serpent was I. I shocked out my sword from the sheath, my lady. The rocks rained down about me, for rattled the earth itseluen. The air grew ardent, and out of the opening, coiling and curling like a cable, a great serpent came—colored comelych blue, and carried into the sky."

  She stopped, holding up her skirt as she looked around at him.

  "O’er the wall, my lady, if it please you," he said in an ordinary tone, with a slight bow of his head.

  Melanthe looked down and saw that the faint dirt track made a turn at a place where the stones were broken down. He gripped her arm to steady her as she stepped across, and then tugged the horse after them through the gap.

  As its last great hoof cleared the stones and thumped down into a bed of damp leaves, she said, "It was colored like the sky?"

  "Yea, but shining, my lady. In the night it nigh glared."

  "Shining!" She frowned. "The serpent called the Scytale glows, so that it may stupefy its victim by its splendor."

  "Bedazzled was I to beholden it, my lady."

  "And the air about it grew hot?"

  He made a heartfelt sound of assent. "Heat such as Hell mote hurl, my lady. All my iron afflicted me, as if afire was I. By what work I wielded my sword, I wot nought. Marks it made upon my palm for months thereafter."

  She chewed her lip. "A basilisk might cause such. They have been known to burn people up. I read naught of their color as blue. They’re striped in white. But they have wings and might fly." The slope of the land rose as they walked. She followed the path over another ridge and furrow.

  "Wings it wore, yea," he said, "but it wafted as if the air arched it aloft, like autumn leafs, for its bulk was too big to bravely fly on wing. It shrieked as the sound of...as the sound of..." He paused for a long moment. "I know nought. I ne can think of no word. As the sound of..."

  Melanthe kept walking, scouring her memory for what she had read of these things in the beastiaries, barely listening to him as he repeated the phrase beneath his breath.

  "As the sound of—a scythe on a whetstone!" he exclaimed, with the tone of having solved some puzzle. "It shrieked as the sound of a scythe on a whetstone."

  She tripped over a root and caught herself. As she looked up she realized that the ridges and furrows ended here. A darker forest lay ahead, the trunks older, thick and gnarled. She hesitated.

  The steady beat of the destrier’s hooves came to a halt behind her. "Will my lady riden now?" he asked.

  Melanthe was not so certain that she wished to lead the way afoot into this woods. She nodded. He put his hands at her waist and lifted her up to sit aside on the saddle next to Gryngolet. For a moment he looked up at her, a phantom of his uncommon smile in his eyes.

  It was an impossible thing to resist. She smiled back, but he cast down his look, moving away to lead the horse into the deeper wood.

  They traveled steadily, following a muddy path that skirted bogs and roots, as sinuous as his dragon. The rhythm was brisker now, for she realized that he was after all not so weighted down by his armor that he could not stride along at a far more active pace than hers. She ducked branches, deep in thought as she listened to him, unable to conceive of what beast he had actually slain. His description was detailed enough: its size immense, its scales blue, its breath fetid, and the air about it scorching; its aspect like a great serpent, but head broad and flat, more like to a lizard with the teeth of a wolf, wings too small to hold it aloft.

  She allowed for exaggeration—what hunter did not make his boar larger and fiercer with the telling?—but the more she pressed him for particular attributes, the more she began to think that he had killed a very large basilisk. Until he showed her the scars beneath Hawk’s coat, three long ridges full two inches apart, that the monster had made as it fell upon the horse from its fiery height. Then her opinion wavered.

  "A griffon hates horses," she speculated. "But sayest thou its head was like to a lizard? Not an eagle?"

  "Nay, my lady, nonsuch like. But my horse hatz the heart of an eagle. Sprang he up with a scream, striving to kill. Such strength did he spend that he splintered his chain. His loose fetter he flung, to flay as if were a weapon. He smote the serpent and slashed it in its loathly eye. The dragon rebounded with a roar, ripping his hide." He laid his hand on Hawk’s shoulder over the old scars, passing his palm down the horse’s coat as he walked. "I plunged to impale the paunch that it bared. Mother Mary blessed me, I believe, and abetted me in that moment, for my sword struck the scales and slipped betwixt. Bright blood boiled forth, but the creature coiled about my cuirass, choking my breath, wringing life from my limbs and light from my eyes. I descried my sword divided and dragged from my hand. I felt the fetid air as the fangs locked upon my feet, in the way that a snake feeds on a field mouse."

  He stopped speaking. Melanthe realized that her hands clenched the saddle, gripping it as if she could throw off the deathly coils herself.

  "What didst thou do?" she asked, loosening her grip.

  "I submitted my soul to Mary’s sweet mercy." He glanced back at her. "Next I knew, I lay near dead. Beside me the beast was buckled, embedded with my sword in its breast, its lifeblood all about me. My sabatons it had sucked off my soles and swallowed my legs to the knee. I wrenched free and withdrew, and bowed down to bear thanks to God the Almighty. And thus in another day this aventure betided," he said. "I abidingly thereof bear witness, my lady."

  "Depardeu! What became of the creature?"

  "I will show you, my lady."

  "Wee loo! Show me?"

  He nodded ahead. "My lady sees before us, through the trees? There is a chapel. Peraventure, the creature’s bones lie there yet."

  * * *

  She slid from the saddle even before he could help her down. In the afternoon shadow the little chapel was a dark smudge against the boggy woods, an old and unadorned rectangle of slate, windowless. With an echoing scrape of wood on stone, the knight pushed open the door and stood back to let her pass.

  She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby table.

  "It is a dragon." Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent over the skull.

  In the half-light it was bleached bone, the sunken eye holes deep caverns of black. But at the first touch, Melanthe sucked a hissing breath.

/>   Stone. No real skeleton, but heavy and hard, solid inside where a skull would be gaping. The eye hollows, the backbone, the teeth—all white lime rock, impossible to misjudge.

  She whirled to face him. He was still leaning on the door, his arms crossed, the faintest suggestion of an upward curve at the corner of his mouth.

  "Thou lied to me." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Is naught but a rock!"

  His mouth twitched.

  "Thou lied to me!"

  "My lady wished a firedrake." His hidden smirk became a grin.

  "Thou knew that I believed thee. Thou took delight in it. Thou lied to me!" Her vehement words returned, fierce whispers echoing against the walls and floor, lied-lied-lied.

  "Lied?" The door scraped as he pulled back his weight in the face of her sudden advance. "A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure. In verse—" He gave a modest shrug. "Of a kind."

  "Verse! I—" She stopped. She remembered him searching for a word to describe the dragon, repeating the phrase under his breath, until he came out with the same sounds echoing and compounding through the sentence, rhyming at the head of words instead of the tail, like the old poetry. In the peculiar convoluted idiom that was his normal English, she had barely noticed.

  He was still smiling at the floor. He thought it amusing. In a voice as cold as the dragon stone, she said, "If I find thee in a lie to me again, knight, thou wilt rue it to thy early death."

  Ruck raised his eyes, his humor expiring. She was white, staring at him with her chin set and trembling.

  "As thou livest," she said through clenched teeth, "never lie to me, in revel or no. Swear it now."

  "Lady—" He had meant only to make a mirth. She did not understand.

  "Kneel!" she commanded.

  He hesitated. He expected her to smile. He thought she would say that she made merry of him, and laugh as she had when she threw the sand.

  "On thy knees, knave!" She pointed at the floor. Her hand shook. "Abase thyself!"