Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  Then he leant on the ice. He squinted. Though the ice was dense and deathly, he could see straight into it.

  The woman to whom the foot belonged lay there. She was, like the rest, frozen to stone. Just like the old woman caught outside, save that this one was young. And her belly rose in a hill. She had been carrying a child for some time, he thought, almost to term.

  Umb, faintly said the heart. Umber-umber-umber.

  It came from the belly, from the womb of the ice-blast-frozen woman whom the dragon had killed with a single breath.

  I must smash through.

  It was crazy, yet he hammered with his gloved fists on the thick ice until it cracked. It shattered and gave way.

  In the stark silence after the beat of the heart had left him, which it did exactly as the ice-wall shattered, he thought, in plain renewal of the hope for life—We two broke this open. We two—

  I.

  And he.

  WHEN he joined Nenkru’s Kimolaki those years before, they had just lost their shaman, who had perished in a lead-crack of the restless land-ice. Very oddly, once settled with the scavenger band, Kulvok’s need for magic trickery had faded as his real magical abilities grew. After this, he could often foretell, even foretell the paths Ulkioket might take. And he could heal.

  Now he would try to heal the child on the ice.

  Before he realized that it had no need of him.

  AS the blast-ice smashed at his blows, something swift and appalling happened to the corpse of the frozen, pregnant woman. She also shattered— like an ancient glass. And then she was simply gone.

  Instead, the baby from her womb lay on the white ground.

  Kulvok stared. At first, he wasn’t able to stir.

  One by one, the others stole up. They even left their scavenged goods, the things they always got by following cautiously behind a dragon and raiding the settlements it had destroyed. But this event was more bizarre even than the breath of ice.

  “Is it—dead too?”

  “No. See, it’s breathing.”

  By then, Kulvok had stretched out his hands, pushing warmth from the core of his body into a magical cocoon to enwrap the baby. He felt the heat too, they all did, for they spoke of it, and anyway the air pulsed, and a little of the thinner ice melted and dripped. But it had no effect on the child. None.

  He—the baby was a male—lay there, quietly shifting about, turning his head with its smooth fine cap of hair, kicking with his feet and waving his hands slowly. His eyes were open too. They fixed on the men with an unusual attention. The new-born never seemed to gaze like that. Nor did he cry or wail. His mouth, small as a silver bead, stayed shut.

  “Nothing happens, Kulvok. How did he survive? But he’ll die in a minute.”

  “Look at his colours. He’s already dead. It’s just some tremor that makes him move—”

  “But his eyes move—look—he blinks!”

  “That too, some tremor as the dead body gives way.” The heat from Kulvok’s hands was now cooling also. Coldness seeped back into his gloves, his palms and fingers. Only the scarred fingertip gave off a sudden flash of feeling, as if again it had been burnt. But that was gone as soon as it came.

  Yet he knew the child lived. And why it lived. Was it anything but obvious?

  He had a silvery white skin, the baby, that darkened somewhat at brows and eyelids, the lips, the folds of ears and legs … The film of hair on his head was white too, like fine smoke against a shadow. His eyes—his eyes were the green-blue of the core of a floating iceberg.

  Near to birth, perhaps only minutes from it, the dragon’s ice-blast had caught him, killing all else, his mother included. But some god or spirit that abruptly cared for mankind had saved him, and the freeze had instead reworked every inch and atom of his body.

  Kulvok stepped away. He spoke firmly in a low voice.

  “He isn’t dead or dying. He’ll live. And we are entrusted with him—I can hardly guess why it is we who were chosen—perhaps to pay for our crimes.” The men stood about him in dumbstruck noiselessness. “Can you not see what he is?” Kulvok asked them in a kind of anger. “He is the hero. The hero.”

  PART TWO

  DURING the brief summer, pale golden down covered the low trees and shrubs. Fruits grew there, the shades of fire and darkening skies.

  Salmon and blackfish might be harvested from the narrow rivers, streams, and lakes.

  Thin grass and lichen toned the landscape brown and green.

  Nenkru’s band moved as ever to the grassland by the great Tear Lake, and lived there with their women and children, in tents of deer-hide. The women made bread from the bitter seeds of grasses, which was only possible in the summer, and pickled the fruits in fruit vinegar. They feasted on the meat of deer and the livers of seal.

  Always to Kulvok, this time, a little less than three months, which was presaged only by the lifting sun and by the breaking of the ice with colossal booms and roarings, and which often ended in only a single night of freezing gales and snow, was like a stupid if pleasant dream.

  In a way Kulvok had always hated summer-time. It resembled the wicked promise of a faithless woman. She gave you, almost without warning, great happiness, and acted as if she loved you. Then in one night betrayed and abandoned you. Yet you were an idiot—always you welcomed her return. And though never again did you believe her sweet-talking, still you relished her.

  Anlut, though … What did summer mean to him? Kulvok was unsure. Unsure what winter meant to Anlut, as well. Or what mankind meant. Or what Kulvok himself meant to Anlut, he who had taken the involuntary position of a father to the boy, just as the shaman’s wife, Nuyamat, had been awarded the status of Anlut’s mother. Anlut had been a baby then, and so had to have one. Had to have a woman to care for him and a man to hunt for him. Or had he needed none of that? As he had needed no healing, no warmth, no milk, maybe not even the protective, predictive words with which Kulvok brought him inside the guardian family of the Kimolaki band: Hero. Hero.

  ALMOST sixteen summers passed, and fifteen winters of many thousand nights. The baby had become an infant, a child, a youth. A man. The hero born from flesh and ice.

  He was tall, among the tallest of the men, straight and lean, hard as rock and flexible as a willow-branch. He had learned, as all men did, to hunt and fish, mend weapons and tools, build house towers of ice-brick, raise the ice-brick platforms up inside for two storeys and hang a strong rope-ladder of walrus-hide whereby to climb up and sleep. At all times, he was polite. He spoke to the women, young and old, as a good and serious child does to his mother. To the men, he spoke respectfully, as if to elder brothers. Even to the oldest men, he spoke this way. Which was not respectful enough, of course, yet you could not fault it.

  Kulvok, taking the place of his father, had named him Anlut. The name meant simply, the one of the tribe of the Lut.

  When she had seen him for the first time, Nuyamat had let out a loud screech. But she went dumb when Kulvok told her sternly, “He’s been given to us to tend. Do everything for him that a woman must do for the newborn—but never remove your gloves when you touch him. Inoro’s wife is still in milk from her last child. She’ll put some milk in a jar, and you must feed him this through a hollow reed I’ll make for you. If there are doubts, ask me. If I’m away, let it be. He’ll live, even if neglected. So I think. Left naked on the ice, he thrives.”

  “What is it?” Nuyamat had whispered then.

  “A baby,” he replied flatly.

  “But—”

  He had already informed her of what was required of her. He would not repeat himself. He put the child, not crying, not struggling, already strangely coordinated and attentive, on the fur rug that lay across the lower sleeping place, for right then they were still in their one-storey ice-tower.

  “Do as you’re bid,” he snapped.

  She had no choice. She never remonstrated with him again.

  Did they all get used to Anlut? No, never. But they became ac
customed to not becoming accustomed. And when he grew, matured, and reached the appropriate ages of a male’s life, he was taught as the other boys were.

  The house-wolves did treat him differently from all other people, though not with particular aversion. It was as if he were a favoured piece of equipment they must be careful of and note. And he did not ever try to learn the use of a sled. Later, he would run, fast and tireless, behind the sleds of others, always keeping up.

  Now, as Kulvok watched him cross the summer grassland, running lightly with his fish-spear in hand and a string of silver catch around his shoulders, the shaman sucked in his breath as ever. For sunlight, like the light of winter stars, half-sun and red moonglow, reflected on Anlut’s pale skin—his carapace. His complexion was smooth, without a blemish, like the ice. He gleamed and flickered here with faint blue and tawny tints, and where the hot settling sun snagged on his long white hair, it too shone golden.

  “I have twenty-seven fish, Kulvok,” said Kulvok’s ice-cold fosterson. His voice was cool but not unhuman. His heart-of-ice eyes blinked once, in a human way.

  “We’ll eat well then,” said the shaman. He knew that Anlut too would eat, if less than any other man of his years. And he knew that the fish Anlut carried would not be frozen, but frosty, and also that when they were cooked, everyone reaching for the food-pot would be wary not to brush against Anlut’s bare hands. Anlut’s bare skin did not burn you with its coldness, yet cold he was, colder than new snow. You could not bear to touch him or—Kulvok wondered—was it that he could not bear to touch you? If he had ever loved any of them, he had never been able to express that physically. He would never marry, nor himself sire children. But, anyway, Kulvok did not think that Anlut loved them. Anlut had been saved from certain death and remade by some uncanny force for quite another task. Which, naturally, he had been told from the start.

  SUMMER was nearing its end that night. Clouds drifted over the stars, and in the far sky was a rippling and banding that was not Ulkioket but only the wild winter lights beginning to practice their weaving.

  After the evening meal, Anlut sat apart from the tent and gazed at this, while the other young men sat laughing and playing a gambling game with horn-pieces, the children scampered after a rag ball, and the women salted meat and gossiped. Even the young women never glanced at Anlut. Only the fire paid him attention, glimmering hypnotically on the contours of his hands and face.

  He could, like any other man, draw close to fire. It had no bad effect on him. But neither did it warm him. Once, in the earliest days, when Kulvok sometimes questioned him, Anlut had said he felt no heat from fire and had no need of it to preserve him. Yet he liked it, its colour and rhythm, the dances it performed in a lamp or on a hearth. When the young women danced, he watched them also, but in a detached and solemn way. As if, again, simply meaning to be polite.

  Kulvok felt his own age. He was thirty-four years now, practically an old man. His back was growing humped, and he had grey strands in his black hair. He had fathered no sons that he knew of anywhere, and decidedly none here. Nuyamat, he understood very well, resented this, and that—worse—instead of a proper baby she had had this monster thrust on her. A demon who might sit naked in a snow gale and not come to harm.

  Kulvok had never, either, been sure if the distance the band kept from him distressed Anlut. The shaman was unsure, in fact, of all things to do with Anlut, save that one paramount thing, the reason for Anlut’s life.

  “Anlut,” said Kulvok now.

  “Yes?” said Anlut, looking up at him.

  “Come with me to my other tent. Tonight, my powers tell me, is a time that you and I should talk together.”

  Anlut rose. He was graceful, although not in a human way at all. His movements reminded Kulvok of the flow of plate ice on the sea, the passage of a cloud. Or the dance of fire, or of the Northland lights. Or the scintillance of a dragon.

  For a moment, they stood quite still. No one else glanced their way.

  Yet from the corner of his eye, Kulvok noticed Etuk bending to one of the little portable shrines of Ulkioket, which Etuk set up always in the doorway of his tent or his ice-tower. All Nenkru’s Kimolaki did that still. And all through these years, once he had been old enough, Anlut had gone out with them to follow after the ice dragon as well, and to thieve what had been left frozen by him in his blast-ice. Anlut therefore had even seen Ulkioket, now and then, though always in the distance, for none of the rest of them would attempt the suicide of going close. Anlut had not questioned or resisted, not spoken of these excursions, ever.

  Despite being warned by the shaman early of his nature and his future role as hero, and, ultimately, dragon-slayer, Anlut had never expressed misgivings, never apparently wanted to learn more—and never once vowed himself ready for the quest, let alone unready.

  When Kulvok and Anlut turned off from the camp towards the shaman’s other tent, where he communed with his sorcery, only Etuk squinted after them. Then he rubbed more meat fat into the shrine. “Not I,” said Etuk to Ulkioket, “I never agreed to nurse this strangeling. None of us agreed. It was the shaman’s business. We thank you always, lord. You are our god.”

  THE other tent was dark and had no fire.

  Kulvok kindled the single small lamp that only gave up a one-foot flame, but that flame white as snow.

  “You may sit or stand,” said Kulvok. But he stood. Anlut stood also.

  Is he only a mirror? His skin reflects, his hair—is that the clue to the ice-hero? He has learned our life by copying, not through instinct or feeling. He does as I do now, just as my reflection in an ancient piece of polished metal would do if I kept one in my tent.

  This uncomforting idea might be part of his prescience, Kulvok decided. Yet too, in the past year, he had sensed his shamanic powers waning, as they had at first, when he was eight and had lost his father.

  “Since you were able to hear,” said Kulvok, “I told you of your birth, and of the function that some god or spirit gave you.”

  “Yes, Kulvok,” said Anlut’s cool voice.

  “What then do you think of such a destiny?”

  Anlut said nothing. Then he said, “That it must be mine.”

  Kulvok frowned. He glared into the turquoise eyes that seemed almost fiery with their alien iciness.

  “Then you are to seek the dragon and kill it. Since only you, that are yourself ice-formed, as he is, can face him, his scorching pad-marks, his untouchable surface, his breath-blast of freezing death. And you will destroy him, and thereafter any others of his kind you come across. Ulkioket,” said Kulvok, slowly. “Say his name.”

  “Ulkioket.”

  “Say your own, now.”

  “Anlut.”

  “The gods made you for this. Even the day before the dragon struck your village, when you were only hot flesh and blood in your mother’s womb, I heard the beating of your heart, and we ran to find you, there in the path of the dragon.”

  “And now,” said Anlut, who seldom spoke save when spoken to, “I am cold and in the world, and he is in my path instead.”

  Kulvok stared.

  Then he grunted. He was surprised by the assertion. A hero’s statement of intent. It lifted his spirit slightly, and the flame of the small lamp too rose, becoming for a second almost two feet in height.

  And in the lamplight, Anlut glowed for a moment with a bronzen skin like a proper human man. But the flame sank.

  Outside, eerie as wolves, the women began to sing some chant of summer’s end.

  “The time is now,” said Kulvok. “Now you must go to him. He’s out on the edge of summer and winter, stirring from his summer sleep, starting to move about and flex himself as men do when warmth draws near. I have traced his whereabouts through my magic. I’ll show you which direction you must go.”

  “No need,” said Anlut. “It’s eastward.”

  “How … do you know?”

  “I’ve followed him in the past, have I not, Kulvok, with the Kimolaki
? I’ve learned his ways. Perhaps he calls me now, if the time is now. You summoned me first. Otherwise, I should have sought you also tonight.”

  Kulvok heard this avowal in a stony amazement. Anlut, between one hour and the next, had altered. But the ritual of sending must conclude.

  “Go then, Anlut. My kind have given all we might to you, and I can give you nothing more, for you need nothing of mine, nor did you ever need it.”

  “That’s true,” said the young man, the hero, the creature of the ice, cold and level, heartless—even though his heartbeat had shouted and howled at this other man over sixteen years before, calling him to find him. “Farewell then, Kulvok. Fare well then, band of Nenkru.”

  Without another word, he went out, pausing only to dip inside the home tent, emerging presently with spear and knife. Anlut left their camp. Thinking him off to some lonely night hunt, no one paid heed. Nuyamat was singing with the women. She did not look up. Impervious, the wolves gnawed bones, ignoring all.

  Kulvok himself withdrew again into his tent of magic. He lit the fire-pot, but not in order to see anything in it. He felt the going away of Anlut like a weird silver strand that pulled out of him, unravelling as it went, fraying to nothing on the brown grassland beside the tear-shape of the lake. Death, Kulvok believed, must feel similar. Nor, he thought, would he have long now, before he knew for sure how death must feel.

  PART THREE

  ANLUT trekked eastward.

  He progressed at a measured, striding trot, covering miles relentlessly, pausing only at sunfall and sunup, when he would sleep on the bare tundra, each time for less than an hour.

  Sunpasses went by, strung pale beads on the black thread of night, which night all the while grew stronger and longer and deeper.

  Then gales came and filled the black night with the different white beading of swirling snows.