Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She was silent then, staring at him. “Then what of you?” she cried abruptly. “What an impossible fire there is in you.”

  It was as if she struck worn stone, split it through its heart to reveal the secret, jeweled colors, the solid fires of crystals within. And she saw more, as his face struggled against its own expression: the massive burden that had hardened around the secret fire, kept it raw, untouched by time, burning within its secret dark.

  He bowed his head. Wordless, he pushed the drumhead back into the box; she saw his hand shake. Then he met her eyes again, his own eyes ancient, haunted, and weary.

  “And what light is in you,” he said, so softly she barely heard his voice above the tide, “to see me so clearly.” He stopped; still held in his gaze she could not move. He was seeing colors now, her colors, her hair, her eyes. He lifted his hand, let a strand of windblown hair brush across his wrist. “Fire,” he whispered. “Gold. And your eyes. Amber flecked with green.” Her eyes widened; for a moment longer she could not move, she could only watch his hand reach out to her, swift as running tide, then drop, just before he touched her. She could move then. She took a step back, and then another, while he watched.

  “I am driven,” he said, just before she turned and ran. “I cannot help myself. Nor can I help you.”

  Liel had come back; she found his ash-streaked clothing on the floor. He was out in the fields, she guessed. Then, with him safe, she stopped thinking. She wove and did not weave, and when she did not weave, she drew, and made watercolors out of her dyes, and painted what she drew, so that when Liel returned at noon, the cottage was full of scraps of paper and linen, covered with wings, faces, eyes.

  He said nothing when he saw them. He ate quietly, she nibbled absently, puzzling over how to get the colors brighter, richer, full of fire, full of light. He said finally, finished with his soup, and leaning back in his chair, “Sly lost all his hops. And his house.”

  She blinked. She saw what surrounded them, then, on chair and loom, hearthstones, floor. She rose quickly, gathered the fragments. She felt him watch her. She said, picking up one last wing, her back to him, “I talked to the stranger.”

  “Did you?”

  “It did no good.”

  He grunted softly. “No. But you were brave to try.” She turned then, met his eyes, saw them wistful, lonely, because she was straying down some dangerous and bewildering path, and he could not see his way to follow.

  She went to him; he put his arms around her, as he sat, and dropped his face against her. “It’s just the colors,” she said helplessly. “They haunt me.”

  “The colors.”

  “Is someone going to the mainland?”

  “Aron and Gamon and Sim left this morning in Lin Avrel’s boat, after we got the fire out. The sooner the better we all decided. There’s nothing else we can do. Is there?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t try.”

  She touched his hair; his hold tightened. She did not answer. He loosed her slowly after a time, looked up at her; her eyes had filled with colors again, the stranger’s dreams. He rose, left the house without speaking.

  She went back to her weaving.

  At mid-afternoon, when the light dazzled through the windows and open door, making the warm shadows even darker, impenetrable, she heard a step on her threshold. She raised her eyes absently, still intent on her weaving. The figure at the door, limned with sunlight, was at once too bright and too dark to recognize.

  Then she recognized its stillness.

  “I came to see,” he said, “what you make.”

  She stood slowly, feeling her heart hammer in her throat. It was as though she had found the tide at her doorstep, or something wild from the wood wanting in. He did not wait for her to welcome him. He stepped in, glancing around him at all her simple things: the painted crockery, the iron pots, the red vase full of buttercups, a moonshell, a piece of lace, the hanging she had woven to hide the bed. Then he looked at the weave on her loom, of cream and white and pale yellow, with a thread, here and there, of salmon.

  “What is it?”

  “A blanket,” she said. “A wedding gift.”

  And then he saw the little pile of her sketches.

  He looked through them, holding them so carefully not even the papers rustled as he drew one from behind another. In the light that fell from the windows over her loom only his hands were illumined, holding what she had made of his makings. His face was in shadow.

  “The colors are too pale,” she said finally. Her voice sounded odd, loud and tuneless, in the silence. “I had to use my wool dyes for paint. I don’t know any other way.”

  He looked at her finally; she heard his drawn breath before he spoke. “Why?” he whispered. “Why do you want them? They burned your sheep, your wood—”

  “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “Fire burns. Yet we take it into our houses, we live with it. Because we can’t live without it. Something in my heart wants them. They drive you to make them. You should understand.”

  “They don’t harm me.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice shaking. “Oh, yes. They have driven you out of the world. But still you make them because they are so beautiful, so powerful—they set fire to your heart long before they burned anything else. They have charred you, made a dead island of you to live on. And you let them. You let them. You make them out of light and set them free with your music to burn and kill. You never ask yourself why. You make because. Because you can.”

  He moved abruptly into light, so that she could see his face, white as the moonshell, and she thought of something that had been born in the sea, and died, and left its hollow, brittle ghost behind.

  “And would you?” he asked tautly. “If you could?”

  Her eyes filled with tears, at the thought of the screaming animals, Liel’s shirt frayed to a web with sparks, the charred trees, the barns and boats and houses burned. “No,” she whispered. “I could not.”

  “I can.”

  She didn’t answer. He waited, his eyes burning dark, challenging on her face. She did not speak. He dropped the sketches; they scattered like leaves across the floor. A face, half bird, half cloud, stared up at her out of one pale yellow eye. He turned; so did she, dropping down onto the stool at her loom, staring at its soft, pale shades, until she heard him leave.

  The next day, Hila Burne’s cornfields were swept bare by something, Liel said wearily, red as fire, breathing gold fire, with great amber eyes flecked with green. They saved the house and the barn, he added, as Syl, her eyes wide, burning dry as with smoke, patched the holes in his trousers.

  “They’re not so beautiful now,” she said.

  “No.” Then he thought, leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, his feet stretched out toward the cold hearth. “Well. There’s always that moment when you first see it. You forget, for just that moment, what it does. All you do is see, and then it’s like all the things you thought you’d never see in life. Strange lands, palaces, silver rivers rushing in secret through dark forests, mountains older than the moon. It’s part of his magic, I think. That, for that one moment, you forget the past, and each of his makings seems the first one and the most wonderful.”

  She gazed at him, needle suspended. “I never knew you wanted to see those places.”

  “I never thought about them until now.” He didn’t speak again; when she opened her mouth, she heard his slow, exhausted breathing. She put his trousers down then and went quietly to the hearth. She knelt and gathered her sketches off the grate, where they would have been consumed in the mornings fire. She put them on the shelf above her loom.

  She woke before dawn and walked to the sea.

  She didn’t think of Liel finding the bed empty beside her; she didn’t think of what the stranger might say or do when he saw her. She stood among the rocks, watching the tide catch each changing hue of dawn, carry it ashore, and spread it out in the sand under her eyes. She heard music. She watch
ed the sun rise; the music seemed to pull the great, hot fiery eye above the world. It pulled her; she drifted, following the beckoning tide. She found him where she had first seen him, standing half-hidden in the shadow of a rock. He did not turn his head; she did not speak, only listened, and watched the sky, to see what he might weave on his vast loom.

  His music stopped. He looked at her. He did not speak, but his eyes spoke, making and unmaking her.

  She turned her head after a moment, gazed at the tide again. She said softly, “I don’t know what you are. Something of you is human, it seems.”

  “I make trouble, and I am paid, and I leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing more.”

  “I know.”

  “I have nothing to do with you.”

  “No.”

  “Nothing to do with your small weavings, your painted plates, your paper and dyes, your eyes that see beyond fire into light.”

  She swallowed. “No.”

  “This is all I am. All I want.”

  “Yes.”

  “To ask me to stop is to ask me to die.”

  She whispered, “I know.”

  “It would be like drowning in fire.”

  “Could you—” She drew breath; her voice trembled. “Could you find another—some other way—”

  “How can I know that? This is all I know.”

  “No one has ever—”

  “No one has ever asked. No. No one has ever come to me at dawn to watch me weave with the colors of the rising sun. No. I kill, I burn, I unmake. No one has ever been as inhuman as you.”

  She felt herself tremble, though the morning wind was gentle. She held herself tightly, felt words, edged, sharp, in her tight, burning throat. “I see what I see. What I can make, I will make. I will never be able to forget you. Because your weavings have come between me and my loom. I will be haunted by your colors until I find ways to make them. You have set fire to my world.”

  She did not see him again. Two days later, she found, among the rocks, his music open in all its parts, seawater playing the flute and reeds, broken shells playing the small drum. No one came for the money borrowed from the mainland, and on the island, nothing burned except in memory.

  Transmutations

  Old Dr. Bezel was amusing himself again; Cerise smelled it outside his door. The shade escaping under the thick, warped oak was blue. A darker shadow crossed it restively: he must have conjured up his apprentice, who had been among the invisible folk for five days. Cerise planted the gold-rimmed spectacles Dr. Bezel had made for her firmly on her nose and opened the door.

  As usual, Aubrey Vaughn, slumping into a chair, looked blankly at her, as if she had fallen through the ceiling. She noted, with a sharp and fascinated eye, the yellow-gray pallor of his skin. She slid her notebook and pens and the leather bag with her lunch in it onto a table, then opened the notebook to a blank page.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said in her low, quiet voice. She added to the velvet curtains over the windows, for Dr. Bezel beamed at anything she said and rarely listened, and Aubrey simply never listened, “At least I’m not five days late.”

  But this time Aubrey blinked at her. He could never remember her name. She was a slender, colorless wraith of a woman who appeared and disappeared at odd times; for all he knew she was conjured out of candle smoke and had no life beyond the moments he encountered her. But gold teased him: the gold of her spectacles catching firelight and lamplight among laughter, sweat, curses, music… He made an incautious movement; his elbow slid off the chair arm. He jerked to catch his balance and felt the mad, gnarled imp in his brain strike with the pick, mining empty furrows for thought.

  “You were there,” he breathed. “Last night.”

  Behind her spectacles, her gray eyes widened. “You can see me,” she said, amazed. “I’ve often wondered.”

  “Of course I can see you.”

  “How long has this been going on? Dr. Bezel, he sees me. You will have to dispose of one of us.”

  “Yes, my dear Cerise,” Dr. Bezel agreed benignly, peering at his intricate, bubbling skeleton of glass. “Now we will wait until the solution turns from blue to a most delicate green.”

  “You were there,” Aubrey persisted, holding himself rigid to calm the imp. “At Wells Inn.”

  “You are beginning to see me outside of this room? This is astonishing. What is my name?”

  “Ah—”

  “You see, I had a theory that not only am I invisible to you, the sound of my voice never reaches you. As if one of us is under a spell. Apparently even my name disappears into some muffled thickness of air before you hear it.”

  “I can hear you well enough now,” he said drily. He applied one hand to his brow and made an effort. “It’s a sound. Like silk ripping. Cerise.”

  She was silent, amused and half-annoyed, for on the whole, if their worlds were to merge, she preferred being invisible to Aubrey Vaughn. He was seeing her clearly now, she realized, as something more than a mass and an arbitrary movement in Dr. Bezel’s cluttered study. She watched the expression begin to form in his bleared, wincing eyes, and turned abruptly. His voice pursued.

  “But what were you doing there?”

  “Now see,” Dr. Bezel said delightedly, and Cerise forgot the curious voice in the chair as she watched a green like the first leaves flush through the bones of glass. “That is the exact shade. Look, for it goes quickly.”

  “The exact shade of what?” Aubrey murmured, and for once was himself unheard and invisible. “Of what?” he asked again, with his stubborn persistence, and, unaccountably, Dr. Bezel answered him.

  “Of the leaves there. Translucent, gold-green, they fan into the light.”

  “What leaves where?”

  “No place. A dream.” He turned, smiling, sighing a little, as the green faded into clear. “I was only playing. Now we will work.”

  What leaves? Aubrey thought much later, after he had chased spilled mercury across the floor and nearly scalded himself with molten silver. Dr. Bezel, lecturing absently, let fall the names of references intermittently, like thunderbolts. Cerise noted them in her meticulous script. What dream? she wondered, and made a private note: Green-gold leaves fanning into light.

  “Also there is a well,” Dr. Bezel said unexpectedly, at the end of the morning. Aubrey blinked at him, looking pained. Dr. Bezel, distracted from his vision by Aubrey’s expression, added kindly, “Aubrey, if you tarnish the gold of enlightenment with the fires and sodden flames of endless nights, how will you recognize it?”

  Aubrey answered tiredly, “Even dross may be transmuted. So you said.”

  “So you do listen to me.” He turned, chuckling. “Perhaps you are your father’s son.”

  Cerise saw the blood sweep into Aubrey’s face. Prudently, she looked down at her notebook and wrote: Well. She had never met Nicholaus Vaughn, who had enlightened himself out of his existence; he had not, it seemed, misspent his youth at Wells Inn. Aubrey said nothing; the sudden stab of the pickax blinded him. In the wash of red before his eyes, he saw his bright-haired father, tall, serene, hopelessly good. Passionless, Aubrey thought, and his sight cleared; he found himself gazing into a deep vessel, some liquid matter gleaming faintly at the bottom.

  “Analysis,” Dr. Bezel instructed.

  “Now?” Aubrey said hoarsely, bone-dry. “It’s noon.”

  “Then let us lay to rest the noonday devils,” Dr. Bezel said cheerfully. The woman, Cerise, was chewing on the end of her pen, deliberately expressionless. Aubrey asked her crossly,

  “Have you no devils to bedevil you?”

  “None,” she answered in her low, humorous voice, “I would call a devil. I am intimate with those I know.”

  “So am I,” he sighed, letting a drop from the vessel fall upon a tiny round of glass. Unexpectedly, it was red.

  “Then they are not devils but reflections.”

  He grunted, suddenly absorbed in the crimson unknown. Blood?
Dye? He reached for fire. “What were you doing at Wells Inn?” he asked. He felt her sudden, sharp glance and answered it without looking up, “In one way, I am like my father. I am tenacious.”

  “You are not concentrating,” Dr. Bezel chided gently. They were all silent then, watching fire touch the unknown substance. It flared black. Aubrey risked his red-gold brows, rubbed his eyes. At his elbow, Cerise made the first note of his analysis: Turns obscure under fire. Aubrey reached for a glass beaker, poured a bead of crimson into a solution of salts. It fell as gracefully as a falling world.

  Retains integrity in solution, Cerise wrote, and added: Unlike the experimenter.

  The puzzle remained perplexing. Aubrey, sweating and finally curious by the end of the hour, requested texts. Dr. Bezel sent him out for sustenance, Cerise to the library. There she gathered scrolls and great dusty tomes, and, having deposited them in the study, retired beneath a tree to eat plums and farmer’s cheese and pumpernickel bread, and to write poetry. She was struggling between two indifferent rhymes when a beery presence intruded itself.

  “What were you doing at Wells Inn last night?”

  She looked up. Aubrey’s tawny, bloodshot eyes regarded her with the clinical interest he gave an unknown substance. She said simply, “Working. My father owns the place.”

  He stared at her; she had transformed under his nose. “You work there?”

  “Five nights a week, until midnight.”

  “I never saw—”

  “Precisely.”

  He backed against the tree, slid down the trunk slowly to sit among its roots. “And you work for Dr. Bezel.” She closed her notebook, did not reply. “Why?”

  She shrugged lightly. “I have no one to pay for my apprenticeship. This is as close as I can get to studying with him.”

  He was silent, eyeing the distance, his expression vague, uncertain. The woman beside him, unseen, seemed to disappear. He looked at her again, saw her candle-wax hair, her smoky eyes. It was her calm, he decided, that rendered her invisible to the casual eye. Movement attracted attention: her inner movements did not outwardly express themselves. Except, he amended a trifle sourly, for her humor.