Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  Still that molten wrath surged through the weakness and pain. She remembered Caerdinn saying, “Save a dragon, slave a dragon.” At that time, she had not known why anyone would wish to save the life of such a creature, nor how doing so would place something so great within your power. Cock by its feet...

  “Morkeleb!” She walked forward, forgetting her fear of him—perhaps through anger and dread that he would die, perhaps only through the tabat leaves—and laid her small hands on the soft flesh around his eyes. The scales there were tinier than the ends of needles. The skin felt like dry silk beneath her hand, pulsing with warm life. She felt again that sense, half-fright, half-awe, of taking a step down a road which should not be trodden, and wondered if it would be wiser and better to turn away and let him die. She knew what he was. But having touched him, having looked into those diamond eyes, she could more easily have given up her own life.

  In the glitter of the singing within her mind, one single air seemed to detach itself, as if the thread that bound together the complex knots of its many harmonies had suddenly taken on another color. She knew it immediately in its wholeness, from the few truncated fragments Caerdinn had whistled for her in a hedgerow one summer day. The music itself was the dragon’s name.

  It slid through her fingers, soft as silken ribbons; taking it, she began to braid it into her spells, weaving them like a rope of crystal around the dragon’s fading soul. Through the turns of the music, she glimpsed the entrance to the dark, starry mazes of his inner mind and heart and, by the flickering light of it, seemed to see the paths that she must take to the healing of his body.

  She had brought with her the medicines from the Deep, but she saw now that they were useless. Dragons healed themselves and one another through the mind alone. At times, in the hours that followed, she was terrified of this healing, at others, only exhausted past anything she had ever experienced or imagined, even in the long night before. Her weariness grew, encompassing body and brain in mounting agony; she felt entangled in a net of light and blackness, struggling to draw across some barrier a vast, cloudy force that pulled her toward it over that same frontier. It was not what she had thought to do, for it had nothing to do with the healing of humans or beasts. She summoned the last reserves of her own power, digging forgotten strengths from the marrow of her bones to battle for his life and her own. Holding to the ropes of his life took all this strength and more that she did not have; and in a kind of delirium, she understood that if he died, she would die also, so entangled was her essence in the starry skeins of his soul. Small and clear, she got a glimpse of the future, like an image in her scrying-stone—that if she died, John would die within the day, and Gareth would last slightly less than seven years, as a husk slowly hollowed by Zyerne’s perverted powers. Turning from this, she clung to the small, rock-steady strength of what she knew: old Caerdinn’s spells and her own long meditations in the solitude among the stones of Frost Fell.

  Twice she called Morkeleb by his name, tangling the music of it with the spells she had so laboriously learned rune by rune, holding herself anchored to this life with the memory of familiar things—the shapes of the leaves of plants, gentian and dog’s mercury, the tracks of hares upon the snow, and wild, vagrant airs played on the pennywhistle upon summer nights. She felt the dragon’s strength stir and the echo of his name return.

  She did not remember sleeping afterward. But she woke to the warmth of sunlight on her hair. Through the open Gates of the Deep, she could see the looming rock face of the cliffs outside drenched with cinnabar and gold by the afternoon’s slanted light. Turning her head, she saw that the dragon had moved and lay sleeping also, great wings folded once more and his chin upon his foreclaws like a dog. In the shadows, he was nearly invisible. She could not see that he breathed, but wondered if she ever had. Did dragons breathe?

  Lassitude flooded her, burying her like silk-fine sand. The last of the tabat leaves had burned out of her veins, and that exhaustion added to the rest. Scraped, drained, wrung, she wanted only to sleep again, hour after hour, for days if possible.

  But she knew it was not possible. She had saved Morkeleb, but was under no illusion that this would let her sleep safely in his presence, once he had regained a little of his strength. A detached thread of amusement at herself made her chuckle; Ian and Adric, she thought, would boast to each other and every boy in the village that their mother could go to sleep in a dragon’s lair—that is, if she ever made it back to tell them of it. Even rolling over hurt her bones. The weight of her clothes and her hair dragged at her like chain mail as she stood.

  She stumbled to the Gates and stood for a moment, leaning against the rough-hewn granite of the vast pillar, the dry, moving freedom of the air fingering her face. Turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder and met the dragon’s open eyes. Their depths stared into hers for one instant, crystalline flowers of white and silver, like glittering wells of rage and hate. Then they slid shut again. She walked from the shadows out into the brilliance of the evening.

  Her mind as well as her body felt numbed as she walked slowly back through Deeping. Everything seemed queer and changed, the shadow of each pebble and weed a thing of new and unknown significance to her, as if for years she had walked half-blind and now had opened her eyes. At the northern side of the town, she climbed the rocks to the water tanks, deep black pools cut into the bones of the mountain, with sun flashing on their opaque surfaces. She stripped and swam, though the water was very cold. Afterward she lay for a long time upon her spread-out clothing, dreaming she knew not what. Wind tracked across her bare back and legs like tiny footprints, and the sun-dance changed in the pool as shadows crept across the black water. She felt it would have been good to cry, but was too weary even for that.

  In time she got up, put on her clothes again, and returned to camp. Gareth was asleep, sitting with his knees drawn up and his face upon them on his crossed arms, near the glowing ashes of the fire.

  Jenny knelt beside John, feeling his hands and face. They seemed warmer, though she could detect no surface blood under the thin, fair skin. Still, his eyebrows and the reddish stubble of his beard no longer seemed so dark. She lay down beside him, her body against his beneath the blankets, and fell asleep.

  In the drowsy warmth of half-waking, she heard John murmur, “I thought that was you calling me.” His breath was no more than a faint touch against her hair. She blinked into waking. The light had changed again. It was dawn.

  She said, “What?” and sat up, shaking back the thick weight of her hair from her face. She still felt tired to death, but ravenously hungry. Gareth was kneeling by the campfire, tousled and unshaven with his battered spectacles sliding down the end of his nose, making griddle-cakes. She noted that he was better at it than John had ever been.

  “I thought you were never waking up,” he said.

  “I thought I was never waking up either, my hero,” John whispered. His voice was too weak to carry even that short distance, but Jenny heard him and smiled.

  She climbed stiffly to her feet, pulled on her skirt again over her creased shift, laced her bodice and put on her boots, while Gareth set water over the coals to boil for coffee, a bitter black drink popular at Court. When Gareth went to fetch more water from the spring in the woods beyond the wrecked well house, Jenny took some of the boiling water to renew John’s poultices, welcoming the simplicity of human healing; and the smell of herbs soon filled the little clearing among the ruins, along with the warm, strange smell of the drink. John fell asleep again, even before Jenny had finished with the bandages, but Gareth fetched her some bannocks and honey and sat with her beside the breakfast fire.

  “I didn’t know what to do, you were gone so long,” he said around a mouthful of mealcake. “I thought about following you—that you might need help—but I didn’t want to leave John alone. Besides,” he added with a rueful grin, “I’ve never managed to rescue you from anything yet.”

  Jenny laughed and said, “You
did right.”

  “And the promise you made?”

  “I kept it.”

  He let out his breath with a sigh and bowed his head, as if some great weight that had been pressing down upon him had been lifted. After a while he said shyly, “While I was waiting for you, I made up a song... a ballad. About the slaying of Morkeleb, the Black Dragon of Nast Wall. It isn’t very good...”

  “It wouldn’t be,” Jenny said slowly, and licked the honey from her fingers. “Morkeleb is not dead.”

  He stared at her, as he once had when she had told him that John had killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr with an ax. “But I thought—wasn’t your promise to John to—to slay him if—if John could not?”

  She shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair snagging in the grubby fleece of her jacket collar. “My promise was to Morkeleb,” she said. “It was to heal him.”

  Collecting her feet beneath her, she rose and walked over to John once more, leaving Gareth staring after her in appalled and unbelieving bewilderment.

  A day passed before Jenny returned to the Deep. She stayed close to the camp, taking care of John and washing clothes—a mundane task, but one that needed to be done. Somewhat to her surprise, Gareth helped her in this, fetching water from the spring in the glade, but without his usual chatter. Knowing she would need her strength, she slept a good deal, but her dreams were disquieting. Her waking hours were plagued with a sense of being watched. She told herself that this was simply because Morkeleb, waking, had extended his awareness across the Vale and knew where they were, but certain understandings she had found within the mazes of the dragon’s mind would not allow her to believe this.

  She was aware that Gareth was watching her, too, mostly when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  She was aware of other things, as well. Never had she felt so conscious of the traces and turnings of the wind, and of the insignificant activities of the animals in the surrounding woods. She found herself prey to strange contemplation and odd knowledge of things before unsuspected—how clouds grow, and why the wind walked the way it did, how birds knew their way south, and why, in certain places of the world at certain times, voices could be heard speaking indistinctly in empty air. She would have liked to think these changes frightened her because she did not understand them, but in truth the reason she feared them was because she did.

  While she slept in the late afternoon, she heard Gareth speak to John of it, seeing them and understanding through the depths of her altered dreams.

  “She healed him,” she heard Gareth whisper, and was aware of him squatting beside the tangle of bearskins and plaids where John lay. “I think she promised to do so, in trade for his letting her past him to fetch the medicines.”

  John sighed and moved one bandaged hand a little where it lay on his chest. “Better, maybe, she had let me die.”

  “Do you think...” Gareth swallowed nervously and cast a glance at her, as if he knew that asleep, she still could hear. “Do you think he’s put a spell on her?”

  John was silent for a time, looking up at the gulfs of sky above the Vale, thinking. Though the air down here was still, great winds racked the upper atmosphere, herding piled masses of cloud, charcoal gray and blinding white, up against the shaggy flanks of the mountains. At length he said, “I think I’d feel it, if there were another mind controlling hers. Or I’d like to flatter myself to thinking I’d feel it. They say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes, lest he put a spell on you. But she’s stronger than that.”

  He turned his head a little and looked at where she lay, squinting to focus his shortsighted brown eyes upon her. The bare flesh on either side of the bandages on his arms and chest was livid with bruises and pitted with tiny scabs where the broken links of the mail shirt had been dragged through it. “When I used to dream of her, she didn’t look the same as in waking. When I was delirious, I dreamed of her—it’s as if she’s grown more herself, not less.”

  He sighed and looked back at Gareth. “I used to be jealous of her, you know. Not of another man, but jealousy of herself, of that part of her she’d never give me—though God knows, back in those days, what I wanted it for. Who was it who said that jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure? But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever learned about anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and its choice to be there—are gone.”

  From there Jenny slid into deeper dreams of the crushing darkness of Ylferdun and the deep magic she sensed slumbering in the Places of Healing. As if from a great distance, she saw her children, her boys, whom she had never wanted to conceive but had borne and birthed for John’s sake, but loved uneasily, unwillingly, and with desperately divided heart. With her wizard’s sight she could see them sitting up in their curtained bed in the darkness, while wind drove snow against the tower walls; not sleeping at all, but telling one another tales about how their father and mother would slay the dragon and ride back with pack trains and pack trains of gold.

  She woke when the sun lay three-quarters down the sky toward the flinty crest of the ridge. The wind had shifted; the whole Vale smelled of sharp snow and pine needles from the high slopes. The air in the lengthening slaty shadows was cold and damp.

  John was asleep, wrapped in every cloak and blanket in the camp. Gareth’s voice could be heard in the woods near the little stone fountain, tunelessly singing romantic lyrics of passionate love for the edification of the horses. Moving with her habitual quiet, Jenny laced up her bodice and put on her boots and her sheepskin jacket. She thought about eating something and decided not to. Food would break her concentration, and she felt the need of every fragment of strength and alertness that she could muster.

  She paused for a moment, looking around her. The old, uneasy sensation of being watched returned to her, like a hand touching her elbow. But she sensed, also, the faint tingling of Morkeleb’s power in the back of her mind and knew that the dragon’s strength was returning far more quickly than that of the man he had almost slain.

  She would have to act and act now, and the thought of it filled her with fear.

  “Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” Caerdinn had said. Her awareness of how small her own powers were terrified her, knowing what it was against which she must pit them. So this, in the end, was what she had paid for John’s love, she told herself, with a little wry amusement. To go into a battle she could not hope to win. Involuntarily another part of her thought at once that at least it wasn’t John’s life, but her own, that would be forfeit, and she shook her head in wonderment at the follies of love. No wonder those with the power were warned against it, she thought.

  As for the dragon, she had a sense, almost an instinct, of what she must do, alien to her and yet terrifyingly clear. Her heart was hammering as she selected a scruffy plaid from the top of the pile over John. The thin breezes fluttered at its edges as she slung it around her; its colors faded into the muted hues of weed and stone as she made her way silently down the ridge once more and took the track for the Deep.

  Morkeleb no longer lay in the Market Hall. She followed the scent of him through the massive inner doors and along the Grand Passage—a smell that was pungent but not unpleasant, unlike the burning, metallic reek of his poisons. The tiny echoes of her footfalls were like far-off water dripping in the silent vaults of the passage—she knew Morkeleb would hear them, lying upon his gold in the darkness. Almost, she thought, he would hear the pounding of her heart.

  As Dromar had said, the dragon was laired in the Temple of Sarmendes, some quarter-mile along the passage. The Temple had been built for the use of the children of men and so had been wrought into the likeness of a room rather than a cave. From the chryselephantine doors Jenny looked about, her eyes piercing the absolute darkness there, seeing how the stalagmites that rose fro
m the floor had been cut into pillars, and how walls had been built to conceal the uneven shape of the cavern’s native rock. The floor was smoothed all to one level; the statue of the god, with his lyre and his bow, had been sculpted of white marble from the royal quarries of Istmark, as had been his altar with its carved garlands. But none of this could conceal the size of the place, nor the enormous, irregular grandeur of its proportions. Above those modestly classical walls arched the ceiling, a maze of sinter and crystal that marked the place as nature’s work timidly home-steaded by man.

  The smell of the dragon was thick here, though it was clean of offal or carrion. Instead the floor was heaped with gold, all the gold of the Deep, plates, holy vessels, reliquaries of forgotten saints and demigods, piled between die pillars and around the statues, tiny cosmetic pots smelling of balsam, candlesticks quivering with pendant pearls like aspen leaves in spring wind, cups whose rims flashed with the dark fire of jewels, a votive statue of Salernesse, the Lady of Beasts, three feet high and solid gold... All the things that gnomes or men had wrought of that soft and shining metal had been gathered there from the farthest tunnels of the Deep. The floor was like a beach with the packed coins that had spilled from their torn sacks, and through it gleamed the darkness of the floor, like water collected in hollows of the sand.

  Morkeleb lay upon the gold, his vast wings folded along his sides, their tips crossed over his tail, black as coal and seeming to shine, his crystal eyes like lamps in the dark. The sweet, terrible singing that Jenny had felt so strongly had faded, but the air about him was vibrant with the unheard music.

  “Morkeleb,” she said softly, and the word whispered back at her from the forest of glittering spikes overhead. She felt the silver eyes upon her and reached out, tentatively, to the dark maze of that mind.

  Why gold? she asked. Why do dragons covet the gold of men?

  It was not what she had meant to say to him, and she felt, under his coiled anger and suspicion, something else move.