The Dragon Queen

by Alice Borchardt

  As soon as he vaulted the table into the central court, I saw he was one of Merlin’s men. He wore the black and silver that are the powerful chief priest’s colors. His sword was drawn and ready. He tried to take my head off in one swipe.

  I leaped clear of the Dragon Throne. I heard Kyra scream into the sudden silence, “Don’t! She is without weapons! For shame!”

  Not for long, I thought. And saw the Gray Watcher, sword in hand. It flew, hilt first, toward me.

  My antagonist was no mean opponent. It took him only a second to see what was happening, pivot to face me, and attack. But he didn’t try to kill me. He did worse, he tried to humiliate me before those who must judge my fitness to rule. With two quick slashes, he cut the shoulder straps that held the dress on my body.

  You must understand, nakedness with us is not shameful; it is ceremonial. The sacrifice is naked when he goes into battle. The king is naked when he lies with the Flower Bride. The queen is naked when she leads the Beltane procession into the forest to ensure the fruitfulness of the land. To be naked is to call the powers. And that’s what my nakedness did.

  The armor leaped out all over my skin, green, shimmering in the firelight, clothing my skin in the ancient symbols of my people. The twining, ever-changing, changeless forms of all creation from the stone to the star, the earth we trod, the air we breathe, the water that changes all things, the fire that transforms them. The patterns belonging to the dance of life wound intricately and forever into one.

  The look on his face when he saw the armor blaze in the firelight and cover the nakedness he courted was one of dismay and sorrow, a little doom, too, because he knew he’d loosed a force he didn’t understand and that he couldn’t contain. And it would kill him.

  And it did, too. Because he tried for my eye, but his blade skidded on my cheek and I had to turn my face away. He thought that would stop me; he thought he found a way out. But he hadn’t, because I pulled a trick Maeniel taught me. My sword flew from my right hand to my left, and I skewered him in the throat. Maeniel’s blade was a fine one; it severed his spine.

  He fell bonelessly, like an empty sack. I spun around, my back to the fire, and saw there were fifteen more after me. But the gray wolf was with me. He hamstrung the first, and I cut his throat going down. He landed between the shoulders of the next.

  The sword of the third slammed into my side. The armor held, but I felt two ribs crack. He was a giant of a man.

  I told you earlier my armor doesn’t prevent me from being hurt or killed. It will turn a blade, that’s all.

  I turned to protect my left side, but he swung at my right. I didn’t parry. I counted on the armor to block the sword’s edge. The pain went through my body like a flung spear as the big man’s sword hit. But my sword was already up, and I was wielding it two-handed. I brought it down as hard as I could on the top of his head. My sword sheared through helmet, skull, and brain. I split his skull to the teeth.

  Another tried to stab me in the back, sending a thin-bladed knife through a chink in my fairy armor. He almost succeeded, but I twisted and the blade snapped away, a problem with a blade that thin. I spun around completely now. I got him by the throat and jerked him toward me. He had no sword, but he tried to send the broken stump of his knife (part of it was still lodged in the armor) under my left breast.

  But my sword went through armor and man too quickly. He died before he could get any pressure behind the blade.

  I jumped free of his falling corpse, but there were more coming at me. Maeniel had accounted for three—the first whose throat I slashed, a second whose neck he’d snapped, and on a third, the wolf’s jaws shattered a thigh bone. He bled out when the bone leaped through the skin.

  But as I said, there were more.

  Talorcan erupted from the fire pit in a fountain of embers. None of those coming to try to finish us off reached me, because the Death Pig disemboweled the first, and the others fled back among the benches while the one the pig killed died, twisting and screaming beside the fire.

  I stood there, bloody blade in one hand, the wolf snarling beside me, and the pig dancing with fury on the other. But we were faced with an even worse threat.

  At least two dozen bowmen stood around Mondig, arrows nocked and pointed at us. And the hall was not a stage but an amphitheater. I was sure there were slingers behind us.

  I spared a glance over my shoulder and saw I was right.

  “Kill them,” Mondig said. The entire hall was silent; his tone was almost conversational.

  “Kill them,” he repeated.

  “Mondig!” Kyra shouted. “Give over! Suppose—just suppose—you can’t!”

  And I saw what had saved our lives so far. I saw it in the faces of the bowmen and the slingers.

  They had seen our powers, and they weren’t sure they could kill us.

  But I looked at the rest of the fire-lit hall, and I knew they could. This was not a gathering of sheep but of wolves. Every man and most of the women had weapons in their hands.

  “Dis!” Mondig hissed like a serpent. “Dis awaits you.”

  The giant boar stirred restlessly beside me, and I understood why he had appeared unsummoned, because I had not called him. We were going to die. We might overcome the slingers and the bowmen, but we would in the end be cut to pieces by the men and women of the Painted People. They would not let us loose to wreak ruin on their land.

  TWENTY-THREE

  AM A KING, HE THOUGHT, AND BEGAN his climb. Odd, he didn’t remember the feast when he had been crowned, but then, he had been full of the spring mead that night. But Morgana told him the next day he hadn’t spoken prophetically or otherwise the night of the feast. He had been amiable toward his companions.

  Sometimes the newly crowned king could become quite violent. Spring mead was a strange mix, and its recipe was a secret of the druid masters. In the spring, bees drink from flowers dangerous even to handle—aconite, henbane, foxglove, the small dense secret flowers of mistletoe, and perhaps other, even more toxic plants. The distilled essence of honey at this time filled the king’s cup with a beverage so intoxicating that some were, at times, lost to permanent madness.

  It was said the new king could look into her soul and see her thoughts. And if he chose to kill a man among his companions, why it must be considered an offering to the powers who rule all things. That night he was sacred and could do no wrong.

  Arthur remembered no anger that night, only a vast distance between himself and the rest of the world—a glass wall against which he pressed his face and fingers set between him and the other revelers at the feast. And a profound sorrow at the abyss of separation between him and others. A separation that he could not escape, around, under, over, or through. That’s why he was in this tower now. He would never be one of them.

  The trunks of the trees in the tower to one side of the stair formed a wall, so he could not look down. The branches above stretched out over his head and held up the walls. He passed a spot where one tree had died, and only dead limbs held up the wall’s boulder-size stones. But vines had covered the dead tree and were nurturing saplings at its base. Beyond the wall of tree trunks on his left there was a whisper, and at times a rush. He knew the falls he had seen next to the tower must in some way flow through it, and the living vegetation that formed the tower’s structure could drink from that flow.

  Light still poured into the tower from beyond the thick growth of leaves on the branches clutching the stone, but in most places the sunlit leaves were so thick he couldn’t see out to the world beyond. Instead, he climbed in a perpetual emerald and golden glow.

  Surely, he thought, it must be sunset by now in the world outside. But then, he didn’t know if the world outside was the one he had left behind. The things he did see between the interstices in the branches weren’t such as to reassure him.

  Once it seemed he looked down at a jungle of thick-trunked trees growing so close together that it didn’t seem even a mouse could force its way betwe
en them. Another time he saw desert with spare plants tipped with flame, all around them barren rock and scorching sun. A beautiful wasteland—the rocks red, purple, brown, and sometimes black—seeming almost to drink in the light and reflect it in glowing pastels more suited to a butterfly’s wings than the frightening barren place he looked upon. The glow of stone was textured like cloth, blue silk, velvet mountains, linen orange rocks, woolen green ravines in those few places where water collected. And the lean, long-branched plants dipped in blood.

  He could appreciate the thought of the builders who created this tower. They had understood what his people knew: that life itself comes closest to immortality. He remembered at Aquae Sulis the forest creeping in, the poplars and willows tearing up the heavy flags the Romans laid. A frigidarium taken over by moss, a fallen wall only a mound under some sweet-flowering vine.

  He could see that the very hard stones that formed the shell of the tower were worn, pitted by wind and rain. But the crusted lichens, fern, vine, and trees kept faith with its builders, more powerful than stone in their everlasting mortality and perpetual self-renewal. When even the stones returned to dust, the skeleton of trees that formed the tower would still stand.

  He was growing both thirsty and weary, wondering if he was doomed to climb forever. He had a number of worries about this place. There are a lot of ways to kill a man, but if the ruler of this stronghold wanted to destroy him, a mind that could conceive the ground plan of a structure like this would have no difficulty in disposing of him.

  He could feel places; it was one of his gifts. He’d felt the malice of the plateau and the thing it kept imprisoned along with him. He’d felt the innocence at the farm. Her innocence. Her honor. And Balin’s.

  He felt nothing wrong here—only the same strange sense of peace. Still feeling it, he reached the top of the stair.

  There he saw how the waterfall was involved with the tower. There was more than one fall. The water entered from the river at the top of the slope and fell into a pool at the base. It drained down from there into the tower. Long, feeding roots from the trees hung like so many strings of a curtain into the falling water that slipped from ledge to ledge, filling basin after rock basin, all thick with roots.

  The vines that formed the base grew up the walls, flowering in wild profusion—red, purple, gold, emerald, amethyst, carnelian, white—hanging in tufts, spikes, chains, ribbons, and spiraling, filling the air with fragrance. Immortal, indeed, growing forever, self-renewing, always changing yet immutable in their endless variation. Trees hung over the pool at the first falls, and it was as though whatever ruled the tower heard his unspoken concerns.

  The pond at the base of the falls was green with saganella and water weed. Horsetails filled the shallows, growing thick as reeds. Arthur walked across, away from the tree staircase to the mossy verge of the pool, and drank. The water was clear, sweet, and good, reminding him of the Flower Bride’s well at the top of the plateau.

  This is not a place of death, he thought, but of life. The paradox was borne upon him. There would be no life without death. No sapling could live without the humus contributed by a fallen tree. Nothing could be born without another dying.

  Something walked through the glade, past the waterfall, around the trunk of a tree fern, and into the shadows beyond. He sat on his heels, considering. Did they come here to look upon what gave way to them, or what rooted itself in their sundered flesh?

  He heard voices talking, arguing in a language he didn’t understand. Then they passed him again, only footsteps bending grass and sound, no sight, troubled his eyes.

  He became aware that the trees whose roots crowded the edge of the pool were laden with fruit. Was it fruit, or something stranger that he had never encountered? Near his face a leaf clasped a chain of cherries. He picked one and put it in his mouth. The taste was a shock of pleasure. It had a big seed, though. He spat it out into the pool.

  He was hungry. He finished the rest. The seeds floated and were carried away by the water as it emptied into the core of the tower.

  The tree was pleased. That was a shock, a profound shock. He had never thought of a tree feeling anything, much less pleasure.

  The other trees around the pool had fruit. Some were like large berries, roseate shading to black, blue shading into purple, beige outlined in scarlet. He made a meal of them. The blues were so sweet he could only eat a few, the red, apple-lemon, the beige almost like some spicy cheese.

  Then he turned toward the path where he had heard the ghost pass. He followed it into a dark, strange forest. Tree ferns, all sizes; massive trees with leaves small, wet, and green as moss; paper-thin ferns that grew covering the trees’ fronds, hanging down but so fragile they presented no barrier to a casual passerby. They were as easily brushed aside as cobwebs.

  It was dark but not threatening. A green darkness, moist and almost unbelievably quiet, until he heard the sound of the sea.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Y THOUGHT WAS THAT KYRA HAD picked wrong again. Mondig, with Merlin’s men backing him, didn’t look to let us surrender.

  Talorcan, in boar form next to me, shifted, then snorted. “I come for someone,” he said in his grating pig voice. “If it is you, lady, I will escort you into darkness with an honor guard.”

  The wolf snarled next to me, his voice thick with menace.

  Kyra leaned against one of the carved roof posts, her face hidden as though she didn’t want to watch my end. Dugald stood next to a white-faced Dunnel. He tried to seize the initiative and save us.

  “Wait!” Dunnel shouted. “Don’t let this go any further. I will give sureties for their behavior. Let this be the last of the killing.”

  “Bah!” Mondig spat. “You haven’t a tithe of the honor price of any of the dead.”

  It was true. Dunnel was a poor man, chief though he was.

  “Merlin’s men!” I yelled back. “What! Are the Painted People ruled by the archdruid?”

  “No, girl!” someone shouted back. “But only a fool shoves his head into a bear’s den.” There was a murmur of assent.

  “There’s more to be gained by being wary of the powerful than by provoking them,” Mondig said.

  The fire was at my back, the armor glowing on my skin, but I felt a wave of cold and I knew. I knew.

  “Kyra!” I shouted. “The head. The head.”

  She looked up, her eyes wild.

  Heads are oracles. This is why they are taken and questioned.

  “Wait,” I said. “Before you spend your blood to end our lives, best you find out about Mondig’s motives.”

  Kyra had Cymry in a sack. Inside the sack, he was confined in a net bag, so he could be suspended. I pulled the head out of the sack.

  With my cracked ribs searing, I ran up the nearest house post, using the carvings to climb. I should be ashamed, I thought. The armor set off my bare body the way an enameled setting displays a rare jewel. Even the blood streaming from the gashes Merlin’s champion inflicted were part of the grim beauty of my flesh. I knew the eyes of every man, and not a few of the women, were fixed on me, and that fear alone hadn’t saved my life.

  I was the embodiment of desire! And the crowd felt it. To the people in the hall, I was Eros made flesh.

  I slung Cymry’s head from the highest rafters. It thumped heavily, just a few feet in front of the fire pit. They sacrificed to it, you know—both the Greeks and Romans—this Eros. And I, for the first time, knew why. And why the chief to be a chief and the king to be a king must lie with the Flower Bride at the flowing well, and why among Farry’s people, kings and chieftains wed the sea.

  Desire is the fountainhead of creation, everlasting renewal the only immortality. Mother and Father both, combined to make me what I am, the living symbol of both, creation and immortality. Imprinted on my soul at this moment was that knowledge, and I would bear it forever, even as I would bear on my body the symbols of that eternal knowledge my people saw time out of mind.

  When I was fi
nished fastening the head, I jumped, somersaulting in the air, and landed lightly on my feet near the fire pit, close to the head. I glanced at Mondig. He looked sick, my signal to proceed boldly.

  Merlin’s men gathered around Mondig protectively. It’s the oldest game in the world I saw being played out before me. Would you capture a whole people? Take them into bondage without difficulty? Simply pick your candidate. He must be eligible to be chief—king, consul, chief magistrate, whatever he is called. You send your army to put him in power. Once he is seated in his position to rule, your army keeps him there, and he does your bidding. He knows that if you abandon him, he dies at the hands of his own subjects. He dares not disobey.

  This is the trick that Merlin used to keep the Painted People quiescent. Mondig was his man, and the chieftains knew it. But Merlin did them no harm, and they were thankful to be left in peace. So they tolerated the alliance.

  I was about to try to change all that, and it might cost me dear if I failed.

  “Cymry,” I commanded. “Come answer me. It is I, your mistress, who summons you!”

  For a moment, I held my breath, and then I saw life creep into the face. The eyes opened, lips came down over the teeth bared in the rictus of death. I heard a whisper as a gasp of awe rolled through the hall.

  “Wine!” Cymry whimpered.

  I caught up a cup and tossed it into the flames. They flared around Cymry’s face, and he cried out in pleasure and laughed.

  “Drunken pig!” Kyra snarled. “Don’t give him any more until he answers your questions.”

  Cymry whimpered and then sobbed. “Isn’t it enough for you, bitch, that I suffer the torments of this dreadful slavery?”

  “No!” Kyra screamed. “No! You murderer! Nothing, nothing you suffer will ever be enough!”