Harrowing the Dragon

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Why?” he asked again, and remembered her in the hot, dense crush at the inn, hair braided, face obscure behind her spectacles, hoisting a tray of mugs. She wore an apron over a plain black dress; now she wore black with lace at her wrists and throat, and her shoulders were covered. He tried to remember her bare shoulders, could not. “What do you need to transmute? Surely not your soul. It must be as tidy as your handwriting.”

  She looked mildly annoyed at the charge. “What do you?” she asked. “You seem quite comfortable in your own untidiness.”

  He shrugged. “I am following drunkenly in my father’s footsteps. He transmuted himself out of this world, giving me such a pure and shining example of goodness that it sends me to Wells Inn most nights to contemplate it.”

  Her annoyance faded; she sat quite still, wondering at his candor. “Are you afraid of goodness?”

  He nodded vigorously, keeping his haggard, shadow-smudged face tilted upward for her inspection. “Oh, yes. I prefer storms, fire, elements in the raw, before they are analyzed and named and ranked.”

  “And yet you—”

  “Cannot keep away from my father’s one great passion: to render all things into their final, changeless, unimpassioned state.” The corner of his mouth slid up: a kind of smile, she realized, the first she had seen. He met her eyes. “Now,” he said, “tell me why you study such things. Do you want what my father wanted? Perfection?”

  “Of a kind,” she admitted after a moment, her hands sliding, open, across the closed notebook. She was silent another moment, choosing words; he waited, motionless himself, exuding fumes and his father’s legendary powers of concentration. “I thought—by immersing myself in the process—that perhaps I could transmute language.”

  A brow went up. “Into gold?”

  Her mouth twitched. “In the basest sense. I try to write poetry. My words seem dull as dishwater, which I am quite familiar with. Some people live by their poetry. They sell it for money. The little I earn from Dr. Bezel turns itself into books. I work mostly for the chance to learn. I thought perhaps writing poetry might be a way to make a living that’s not carrying trays and dodging hands and stepping in spilled ale and piss and transmuted suppers.”

  His eyes flicked away from her; he remembered a few of his own drunken offerings. “Poets,” he murmured, “need not be perfect.”

  “No,” she agreed, “but they are always chasing the perfect word.”

  “Let me see your poetry.”

  “No,” she said again swiftly, rising. She brushed crumbs from her skirt, adjusted her cuffs, the notebook clamped firmly under one elbow. “Anyway, the bell has run, Dr. Bezel is waiting, and your unknown substance is still unknown.” He groaned softly, a boneless wraith in the tree roots, the shadows of leaves gently stroking his father’s red-gold hair. She wondered suddenly at the battle in him, tugged as he was between noon and night, between ale and alchemy. “Do you never sleep?” she asked.

  “I am now,” he said, struggling to his feet, and groaned again as the hot, pure gold dazzled over him, awakening the headache behind his eyes.

  Dr. Bezel, bent over an antique alembic and murmuring to himself, remained unaware of their return for some time. “How clear the light,” he said once, gazing into the murky, bubbling alembic. “It reveals even the most subtle hues in water, in common stones, in the very clay of earth.” Cerise, flipping a poem away from Aubrey’s curious eye, made another note of Dr. Bezel’s rambles through his dreamworld: Clarity. Something within the alembic popped; a tarry black smeared the glass. Aubrey winced at the noise and the bleak color. Dr. Bezel, surprised out of his musings, sensed the emanations behind him and turned. “Did you see it?” he asked with joy. “Now, then, to your own mystery, Aubrey. Cerise has brought your texts.”

  Aubrey, sweating pallidly, like a hothouse lily, bent over the scrolls. While he studied, Cerise ventured a question.

  “Is there a language, in this lovely place, or are all things mute?”

  “They are transmuted,” Aubrey murmured.

  “Puns,” Cerise said gravely, “do not transmute: there are no ambiguities in the perfect world.”

  “Nor,” Dr. Bezel said briskly, “is there language.”

  “Oh,” she said, disconcerted.

  “It is unnecessary. All is known, all exists in the same unchanging moment.” He poured a drop of the tarry black onto a glass wafer. Aubrey gazed bewilderedly at his back.

  “Then why,” he wondered, “would anyone choose to go there?”

  “You do not choose. You do not go. You are. Study, study to find your father’s shining path, and someday you will understand everything.” He let fall a tear of liquid onto the black substance. It flared. The smell of roses pervaded the room; they were all dazed a moment, even Dr. Bezel. “It is the scent of childhood,” he said wistfully, lost in some private moment. Aubrey, saturated by Wells Inn, forgot the word for what he smelled. Driftwood, his brain decided, it was the smell of driftwood. Or perhaps of caraway. Cerise, trying to imagine a world without a word, thought instantly: roses, and watched them bloom inside her head.

  Aubrey, after some reading, requested sulfur. Applying it to his unknown and heating it, he dispersed even the memory of roses. Cerise, noting his test, wrote: Due to extreme contamination of surroundings, does not react to sulfur. Neither does his unknown. She drew the curtains apart, opening a window. Light gilded the experimenter’s profile; he winced.

  “Must you?”

  “It’s only air and light.”

  “I’m not used to either.” He shook a drop of mercury into a glass tube, and then a drop of mystery. Nothing happened. He held it over fire, carelessly, his face too near, his hand bare. He shook it impatiently; beads of red and silver spun around the bottom, touched each other without reacting. He sighed, ran his free hand through his hair. “This substance has no name.”

  “Rest a moment,” Dr. Bezel suggested, and Aubrey collapsed into a wing-backed chair patterned with tiny dragons. They looked, Cerise thought with amusement, like a swarm of minute demons around his head. He cast a bleared eye at her.

  “Water,” he ordered, and in that moment, she wanted to close her notebook and thump his head with poetry.

  “We are not,” she said coldly, “at Wells Inn.”

  “Look, look,” Dr. Bezel exclaimed, but at what they could not fathom. He was shaking salts into a beaker of water; they took some form, apparently, before they dissolved. “There is light at the bottom of the well. Something shines… How exquisite.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Aubrey said. Cerise did not answer. “How can I remember,” he pleaded, “which world we are in if you flit constantly between them?”

  “You could frequent another inn.”

  “I’ve grown accustomed to your father’s inn.”

  “You could learn some manners.”

  Silent, he considered that curious notion. His eyes slid to her face as she stood listening to Dr. Bezel’s verbal fits and starts and writing a word now and then. Limpid as a nun, he thought grumpily of her graceful, calm profile, and then saw that face flushed and sweating, still patent under a barrage of noise, heat, the incessant drunken bellowing of orders, with only the faint tension in her mouth as she hoisted a tray high above heedless roisterers, betraying her weariness. He rubbed his own weary face.

  “I could,” he admitted, and saw her eyes widen. He got to his feet, picked up a carafe of water from a little ebony table. He went to the window, stuck his head out, and poured the water over his hair. Panting a little at the sudden cold, he pulled his dripping head back in and heard Dr. Bezel say with blank wonder, “But of course, it is the shining of enlightenment.”

  “Where?” Aubrey demanded, parting plastered hair out of his eyes as if enlightenment might be floating in front of his nose. “Is it my unknown?”

  “It is at the bottom of the well,” Dr. Bezel answered, beaming at his visions, then blinked at his wet apprentice. “From which you seem to have emer
ged.”

  “Perhaps,” Aubrey sighed. “I feel I might live after all.”

  “Good. Then to work again. All we lack now is a path…”

  Path, Cerise wrote under her private notes for Dr. Bezel’s unknown. Or did he speak of a path of Aubrey’s unknown? she wondered. Their imponderables were becoming confused. Aubrey buried a drop of his under an avalanche of silvery salts, then added an acid. The acid bubbled the salts into a smoking frenzy, but left the scarlet substance isolated, untouched.

  “Sorcery,” Aubrey muttered, hauling in his temper. “It’s the fire-salamander’s tongue, the eye of the risen phoenix.” He immersed himself in a frail, moldy book, written in script as scrupulous as Cerise’s. Dr. Bezel, silent for the moment, pursued his own visions. Cerise, unneeded, turned surreptitiously to her poem, chewed on the end of her pen. It lacks, she thought, frowning. It lacks… It is inert, scribbles on paper, nothing living. I might as well feed it to the salamander. But, patently, she crossed out a phrase, clicked words together and let them fall like dice, chose one and not the other, then chose the other, and then crossed them both out and wrote down a third.

  “Yes,” she heard Dr. Bezel whisper, and looked up. “There.” He gazed into a beaker flushed with a pearl-gray tincture, as if he saw in it the map to some unnamed country. Aubrey, his head ringing with elements, turned toward him.

  “What?”

  “The unknown…”

  “In there?” He eyed the misty liquid hopefully. “Is that the catalyst? I’d introduce my unknown into a solution of hops at this point.” He reached for it heedlessly, dropped a tear of crimson into the mystery in Dr. Bezel’s hand.

  It seemed, Cerise thought a second later, as if someone had lifted the roof off the room and poured molten gold into their eyes. She rediscovered herself sitting in a chair, her notebook sprawling at her feet. Aubrey was sitting on the floor. The roof had been replaced.

  Of Dr. Bezel there was no trace.

  She stared at Aubrey, who was blinking at her. Some moment bound them in a silence too profound for language. Then, a moment or an hour later, she found her voice.

  “You have transmuted Dr. Bezel.”

  He got to his feet, feeling strange, heavy, as if his bones had been replaced with gold. “I can’t have.”

  She picked up her notebook, smoothed the pages, then held it close, like a shield, her arms around it, her eyes still stunned. “He is gone,” she said irrefutably.

  “I couldn’t transmute a flea.” He stared bemusedly at his unknown. “What on earth is this?” He looked around him a little wildly, searching tabletop, tubes, alembic. “His beaker went with him.”

  “No, you see, it was transformed, like him, like your father—it is nothing now. No thing. Everything.” Her voice sounded peculiar; she stood up, trembling. Her face looked odd, too, Aubrey thought, shaken out of its calm, its patient humor, on the verge of an unfamiliar expression, as if she had caught the barest glimpse of something inexpressible. She began to drift.

  He asked sharply, “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Why?”

  “I seem to be out of a job.”

  He began to put his unknown down, did not. He was silent, struggling. Her mind began to fill with leaves, with silence; she shook her head a little, arms tightening around her notebook. “Stay,” he said abruptly. “Stay. I can’t leave. Not without knowing. What he found. How he found it. And there are unknowns everywhere. Stay and help me.” She gazed at him, still expressionless. He added, “Please.”

  “No.” She shook her head again; leaves whirled away on a sudden wind. “I can’t. I’m going back to buckets and beer, mops and dishwater and voices—”

  “But why?”

  She backed a step closer to the door. “I don’t want a silent shining path of gold. I need the imperfect world broken up into words.”

  He said again, barely listening to her, hearing little more than the mute call of the unknown, “Please. Please stay, Cerise.”

  She smiled. The smile transformed her face; he saw fire in it, shadow, gold and silver, sun and moon, all possibilities of language. “You are too much like your father,” she said. “What if you accidentally succeed?”

  She tore her notes out and left them with him, and then left him, holding a mystery in his hand and gazing after her while she took the path back into the mutable world.

  The Lion and the Lark

  There was once a merchant who lived in an ancient and magical city with his three daughters. They were all very fond of each other, and as happy as those with love and leisure and wealth can afford to be. The eldest, named Pearl, pretended domesticity. She made bread and forgot to let it rise before she baked it; she pricked her fingers sewing black satin garters; she inflicted such oddities as eggplant soup and barley muffins on her long-suffering family. She was very beautiful, though a trifle awkward and absent-minded, and she had suitors who risked their teeth on her hard, flat bread as boldly as knights of old slew dragons for the heart’s sake. The second daughter, named Diamond, wore delicate, gold-rimmed spectacles, and was never without a book or a crossword puzzle at hand. She discoursed learnedly on the origins of the phoenix and the conjunctions of various astrological signs. She had an answer for everything and was considered by all her suitors to be wondrously wise.

  The youngest daughter, called Lark, sang a great deal but never spoke much. Because her voice was so like her mother’s, her father doted on her. She was by no means the fairest of the three daughters; she did not shine with beauty or wit. She was pale and slight, with dark eyes, straight, serious brows, and dark braided hair. She had a loving and sensible heart, and she adored her family, though they worried her with their extravagances and foolishness. She wore Pearl’s crooked garters, helped Diamond with her crossword puzzles, and heard odd questions arise from deep in her mind when she sang. What is Life? she would wonder. What is love? What is man? This last gave her a good deal to ponder, as she watched her father shower his daughters with chocolates and taffeta gowns and gold bracelets. The young gentlemen who came calling seemed especially puzzling. They sat in their velvet shirts and their leather boots, nibbling burnt cakes and praising Diamond’s mind, and all the while their eyes said other things. Now, their eyes said. Now. Then: Patience, patience. “You are flowers,” their mouths said, “You are jewels, you are golden dreams.” Their eyes said: I eat flowers, I burn with dreams, I have a tower without a door in my heart, and I will keep you there…

  Her sisters seemed fearless in the face of this power—whether from innocence or design, Lark was uncertain. Since she was wary of men and seldom spoke to them, she felt herself safe. She spoke mostly to her father, who only had a foolish, doting look in his eyes, and who of all men could make her smile.

  One day their father left on a long journey to a distant city where he had lucrative business dealings. Before he left, he promised to bring his daughters whatever they asked for. Diamond, in a riddling mood, said merrily, “Bring us our names!”

  “Oh, yes,” Pearl pleaded, kissing his balding pate. “I do love pearls.” She was wearing as many as she had, on her wrists, in her hair, on her shoes. “I always want more.”

  “But,” their father said with an anxious glance at his youngest, who was listening with her grave, slightly perplexed expression, “does Lark love larks?”

  Her face changed instantly, growing so bright she looked almost beautiful. “Oh, yes. Bring me my singing name, Father. I would rather have that than all the lifeless, deathless jewels in the world.”

  Her sisters laughed; they petted her and kissed her, and told her that she was still a child to hunger after worthless presents. Someday she would learn to ask for gifts that would outlast love, for when love had ceased, she would still possess what it had once been worth.

  “But what is love?” she asked, confused. “Can it be bought like yardage?” But they only laughed harder and gave her no answers.

  She was still
puzzling ten days later when their father returned. Pearl was in the kitchen baking spinach tea cakes, and Diamond in the library, dozing over the philosophical writings of Lord Thiggut Moselby. Lark heard a knock at the door, and then the lovely, liquid singing of a lark. Laughing, she ran down the hall before the servants could come and swung open the door to greet their father.

  He stared at her. In his hands he held a little silver cage. Within the cage, the lark sang constantly, desperately, each note more beautiful than the last, as if, coaxing the rarest, finest song from itself, it might buy its freedom. As Lark reached for it, she saw the dark blood mount in her father’s face, the veins throb in his temples. Before she could touch the cage, he lifted it high over his head, dashed it with all his might to the stone steps.

  “No!” he shouted. The lark fluttered within the bent silver; his boot lifted over cage and bird, crushed both into the stones.

  “No!” Lark screamed. And then she put both fists to her mouth and said nothing more, retreating as far as she could without moving from the sudden, incomprehensible violence. Dimly she heard her father sobbing. He was on his knees, his face buried in her skirt. She moved finally, unclenched one hand, allowed it to touch his hair.

  “What is it, Father?” she whispered. “Why have you killed the lark?”

  He made a great, hollow sound, like the groan of a tree split to its heart. “Because I have killed you.”

  In the kitchen, Pearl arranged burnt tea cakes on a pretty plate. The maid who should have opened the door hummed as she dusted the parlor and thought of the carriage driver’s son. Upstairs, Diamond woke herself up mid-snore and stared dazedly at Lord Moselby’s famous words and wondered, for just an instant, why they sounded so empty. That had nothing to do with life, she protested, and then went back to sleep. Lark sat down on the steps beside the mess of feathers and silver and blood, and listened to her father’s broken words.