She grinned and shook her head. “No, not this time. I’ve never told you this one.”
This happened a long time ago, before I was a dragon-killer. (The beast across the fire harrumphed, and the storyteller chuckled.) Well, it was truly before I was much of anything. I was still chewing with my baby teeth, and holding on to my father’s skirts, had barely even learned to call him father and to make fire, when it first began.
It was a sunny day in late spring. Where we lived then, beside the sea, spring came earlier than it does here, and there were fields and fields of rhododendrons and azaleas in those low mountains that won’t grow up this high. The slopes and valleys were fiery and showy with them, and they were magnificent, though I took them for granted.
One day, as I played in the garden before my father’s house, a great white horse bore a beautiful rider to my door.
(What kind of horse, asked the beast?
(Big. White, said the warrior. You know.
(The kind they call a destrier?
(I guess so, she said. Why do you ask?
(I ate one of those once, said the beast. Never mind that now. Tell on.)
On the horse was a beautiful rider, hard and smooth and weathered, with wild hair, black or brown—I can’t remember, it got white later, but this was earlier—that blew in the wind. The warrior wore silvery-grey armour and was dressed all in white.
(Was it white samite? asked the beast. I had some of that once. Nasty slithery stuff. Felt wet in my mouth.
(I have no idea what white samite is, she said. Shush, or I’ll never get on.)
The rider spurred the horse up the steps and into our house. I saw blood on the horse’s white belly. Then the rider slew my father, with one mighty blow of a long and already-bloody sword. My father’s head was split to his jawbone, and brain and blood flew all over me.
I ran away to the shrine where the swords and daggers lay on their ceremonial rests, and I pulled the matched swords down.
My father had always told me that the swords hung there because the day of the sword was gone. That using them would be stealing war from the era of peace. I had promised not to touch them until he gave me leave. So that was my first theft, and I broke a promise to my father. And anyway, the swords were too heavy for me to wield. I was only a child.
I dragged them away into a corner, while the white rider rode after me through the paper walls of the house. The great head of the horse burst through wall after wall, then the wall shattered below, around its great chest, and finally the paper peeled away to the sides as the rider’s body sliced through. Sometimes for variation the rider set the horse rearing, and its hooves sliced a long slitted door which would curl away from itself and then after a moment the white rider would widen it.
It was a large house, built around a courtyard with a sand garden and another courtyard with a water garden.
(Your father was a scholar, said the beast.
(Shhh.)
My father had been a scholar. Now he had been forced into retirement. And I had to plan for my future in the seconds of safety before each wall behind me burst and I had to retreat again.
It all took on a kind of heavy rhythm — run, stand, break, run... finally I had come round in a great figure eight, like the sign for infinity, and I was back in the entrance hall with my father’s body. He lay splayed in the tile floor, his head as cloven as his hooves, and less neat. I stood beside his body again and shivered, grasping in my arms my daishō, which rested tip-down because they were too heavy for me to even lift. I’d had to drag them, and their sheaths had left furrows in the matting as I fled, which led to me like the rills of irrigation, bringing my killer to me as inevitably as spring water.
The rider’s sword-tip pierced the last wall almost gently and sliced down to the level of my heart—low, I was small—and almost gently one hoof of the white horse probed through and tore the rice paper down to the ground. The horse and rider slid through like a ghost, so slowly that the paper made no ripping sound as the opening widened.
I looked through the high front door, through the carved frame unscathed by the rider’s entry, and considered running out into the sunlight. But I was exhausted and racked with weeping, so I decided to make my stand by my father’s body. Holding the swords before me, a double version of my father’s staff, and the only thing that kept me upright, I stood as tall as I could and faced the enemy.
The white horse pranced up to me slowly, as if in dressage, and the rider looked down.
“So, the stolen child defends the thief,” the rider said. “Do you not want to come home?”
“This is my home,” I said, with only a slight waver in my voice.
“This is your prison,” said the rider, “and I am your rescuer. Your saviour.”
“You killed my father. When I am old enough I will learn to use the swords and I will kill you.”
“Well, then, we had better make sure you get old enough,” and leaning far down, off the side of the horse like an acrobat in the riding circus, the rider grabbed the swords and lifted them up—and me with them. The three of us were tossed across in front of the saddle. “Hold on.” said the rider, and turning the horse in its own circle, and spurring it, the rider urged it from the shady house.
The last glimpse I had of my father’s body and my father’s house was under the white-clad arm and around the white-clad waist, three-quarters upside-down, and then I was desperately clutching the swords with one hand and the pommel of the saddle with the other, as the horse seemed to fly along the road away from the house, through the rhododendron garden down the azalea-lined path, and out into the bright hard world.
The bright hard world, it appeared, was also lined with huge rhododendron forests, blooming in the sunlight. I had never been out of my father’s garden, for he forbade it, and indeed had me hide when tradespeople delivered goods or visitors came to consult him. “It is easy for a child to be stolen away,” he said, “to the great grief of the parent. I would not want to lose you.” Now, I was indeed stolen, but the great grief was mine, and the loss also. My father, wherever he was now, had attained the calmness of death, which we mortals seek to find in life, and so often fail.
I was not calm, and I wept and screamed at the heedless blossoms, kicking my unshod and uncloven feet against the horse and rider—until a thought struck me. I thought that I, alone, defenseless though I had swords because I could not lift them to wield, might just as well be dead.
I had been told by my father that chewing as few as two rhododendron leaves could kill a child. So I flailed out with purpose as the horse pushed through a narrow defile, and that night, I huddled alone beside the warrior who had captured me until I heard the deep slow sleep breathing, then I crept away from the bedroll with my few leaves. I held them in my hands, trembling with fear at the thought of death, then slowly raised them to my mouth.
“If you eat those, and the folklore is true, you will not live to kill me,” said the warrior quietly. I looked up with a start to see that the great blue eyes were open wide, though they looked dark in the light of the moon. “If you do not eat them, I will keep you by me, and train you, and tell you who you really are, and then, if you so choose, you may kill me once you have the height, the skill and the strength to do it well.”
I nodded, and threw the leaves away.
“Scrub your hands with the washrag from dinner,” said the warrior, “and go back to bed.”
I did, but I lay a long time in the gilded darkness, restless and afraid. The moon moved from directly above us across the sky of the clearing and hid behind the black-blossomed forest beyond.
Even longer after that, the warrior spoke. “I am sorry I killed him. I should have let him live, to tarnish before your eyes as you discovered the truth. Now he will always be your hero. Your scholar hero, guarding the three stolen swords.”
“There are only two,” I said under my breath.
“Your name means
The Sword of Your Mother,” said the warrior. “Now go to sleep.” And, to my later surprise, I did.
After she had been silent for a while, the beast rumbled as if it were clearing its throat politely. When she said no more, it said, “What happened then?”
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “I grew up, I learned to fight with the daishō...”
After another pause, the beast said, “I think I ate that rider. Anyway I ate a warrior who looked like that. Big, attractive to the point of arrogance, mean, rode a white destrier, white samite, the whole nine yards. Literally.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I killed them. Years later of course, and after all the usual palaver. I clove their head in twain, right down to their jawbone. Brain and blood flew all over me.”
“Curiously specific form of death.”
“Oh, obvious as hell, and twice as boring. That’s two rôle models I had who died that way.”
“Was either one your real parent?”
“Probably not. They all lied. Who the hell cares? All these breeder stories, if they aren’t about lovers false or true, they’re about parents and children betraying each other.”
“I’ve noticed that. Most evil is much more impersonal in the world than in the stories.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“Did you feel better after? I sometimes feel better after.”
“Not particularly. How did you feel when you let the one-armed hero live?”
“Not better.” After a pause, “but not worse.”
“There it is, then.”
“Do you have any food left?”
“A bit. Well, not really.”
“I’ll go out and get us a calf if you want.”
“Make it a sheep and I’m all in.”
While the beast was gone, she made a torch (from a hardwood staff wound around with some mildewed clothing that its hero wouldn’t be needing any more, which came pre-pitched with essence of mummy) and wandered around the cave. There was a whole new annex since she had last fought there, and it was full of shed scales. They were beautiful in the torchlight: red as fire, gold as sunset, pink and iridescent as sunrise. A few were as small as her palm. She picked out a number in a range of sizes, and brought them back to the fire.
When the dragon returned, she said, “Can I have these? I could make some kick-ass armour out of these.”
The beast nodded, mouth still full of wool. It spat out the sheep by the fire. “I hate these things,” it said. “It’s so much trouble to get the matted wool out of my teeth after I get the meat out.”
“I’ll skin it,” she said, and did, efficiently and quickly. She had been farming for a while, a few years ago, and some things you don’t forget how to do. She chopped off a quarter with her sword—all that work with the clove oil and the soft rag had to be good for something—and impaled the meat on a spear. “Cooked or raw for you?”
“Raw.” The beast held the spitted meat into the fire, rotating it slowly as if they sat in a great hall’s kitchen—which in a way they did—until it was done. Then she ate her cooked meat and the beast ate the raw carcass, crunching its bones, gristle and fat into grit that would later feed its internal fire, if needed.
This took some time, and during that time, she told the rest of her story.
Then it was the beast’s turn. She dozed through part of it, but woke politely near the end to listen to the final exchange of riddles and witticisms.
“What happened then?” she asked.
“I ate him.”
“Why did you do that, after he answered your riddles and everything?”
“It’s my nature,” said the beast.
They laughed, because they both had told that old story to the other, at one time or another.
The fire had burned down some, and she thought they probably should save the rest of the weapons until later. “Well, my friend,” she said.
“We’re enemies,” said the beast.
“At our age,” she said, “anyone who’s still alive is a friend.”
The beast nodded. “Because we’re the only ones who know what we know.”
She smiled, reached across the low fire, and the beast reached out too, and their nailed fingers touched briefly in the safe warmth rising from their shared flame.
“What now?” she said after a moment.
“Let’s go out,” said the beast. “We can sleep later.”
“All right,” she said, and leaned on the beast’s forearm to help lever herself up to her feet. They turned toward the cave mouth, her hand still on its wrist, and went up.
While they had talked and burned their history, the sun had risen, and when they went out of the cave, it was full daylight.
They stood on the lip of the cave, looking out across the vast country, their shadows stretching long and sharp and dark behind them into the cave.
“I will eat you one day,” said the beast.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s your nature.”
“But not today.”
“And I will kill you one day,” she said.
“Of course,” said the beast. “It’s the way of things.”
“Or anyway, it’s my job,” she said. “But not today.”
When she woke later from her familiar nightmare of death and the void, the old fighter beside her stirred, and squeaked a querulous sound of disturbance. She put a gnarled hand on his muscled shoulder.
“Shhh,” she said, “go back to sleep. It was just a dream.”
Candas Jane Dorsey is an internationally-known, award-winning Canadian author, editor, teacher of writing, and literary community leader. Her latest book, ICE and other stories, came out from PS Publishing, England, in 2018, the same year Dorsey was inducted (not indicted!) into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and also was the subject of a festschrift anthology, Prairie Starport, edited by Rhonda Parrish. A new mystery series is upcoming from ECW Press in 2020 onward. Many years ago, a student of Dorsey’s wrote a Plato’s Cave story and the set up stuck in her mind, so with his permission to riff off his set-up, she started to develop her own rather different cave tale, and finished it years later for this anthology.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Like a magpie, Rhonda Parrish is constantly distracted by shiny things. She’s the editor of many anthologies and author of plenty of books, stories and poems. She lives with her husband and three cats in Edmonton, Alberta, and she can often be found there playing Dungeons and Dragons, bingeing crime dramas or cheering on the Oilers.
Her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com and her Patreon, updated even more regularly, is at https://www.patreon.com/RhondaParrish.
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