About time. Xin’s voice prodded her mind, edged with a righteous indignation. What took you so long? You were rude.
“I didn’t know how to find you. I need you,” Tahlia gasped, struggling not to cry. “I’m so glad to see you.” She threw her arms around the dragon’s neck. “The Kark …” She flinched as Xin intruded on her thoughts. For a moment, it was as if her mind was like one of the healer’s scrolls, and the dragon was unrolling it, reading everything that had happened since Tahlia had sent her away.
A deep, crimson anger began to rise in Xin, scorching Tahlia so that she winced.
I remember them. I don’t like them.
“How can you remember them?” Tahlia blinked at her.
We know very little when we hatch, but we remember everything by the time we’re very old. I am remembering more and more. I do not like them. The dragon bared her many curved, silvery teeth in a grin. Let’s go save your small-friend. I like to eat Kark, you know. Her grin widened, teeth glinting. I remember that they are tough and chewy, but not bad. Hold on.
Tahlia scrambled onto Xin’s shoulders and locked her arms around the dragon’s neck. It was much bigger than she, now, big as her canoe. She sucked in a quick lungful of air as Xin dove, and her stomach clenched as down suddenly turned to up as they rose through the tunnel of light. They surfaced in the midst of the longboats, as if no time had passed at all.
The Kark in the nearest boat shouted something and stood, balancing lightly on the gunwales of his boat, a barbed spear in his hand, trailing a line. The dragon reared out of the water, her wings churning, whipping the water to froth. Wind gusted, and the boat canted over, tossing the spearman into the water. The dragon’s head shot out with the speed of a sea snake, and the man’s scream choked off as the jaws closed on him. Then the ocean lifted in a white whirl of power.
Tahlia clung to Xin’s neck, blinded by stinging spray, barely able to breathe. The roaring chaos seemed to go on forever, and she had the sensation of moving at great speed, but she didn’t dare open her eyes, clutching the dragon’s neck with all her strength, afraid that her grip would fail, that she would fall into the roaring maelstrom around them.
Time stretched on forever, and her arms began to tremble with exhaustion. Then, suddenly, the roaring began to fade. Shivering, she straightened, blinking in the Crone’s weak light as the dragon shook her shrinking wings and folded them close to her side. The three ships still floated, but canted over, their decks scoured clean. Not a single Kark was visible anywhere.
“What happened to them?” She pushed wet hair out of her eyes.
The dragon bent her long neck and nosed her wing into a neater fold. I took them elsewhere.
“What about Kir?” Fear seized her.
I was careful. The dragon twisted her long neck to turn a reproachful eye on Tahlia. Look, he’s waving at you. She made a sound like a blowfish surfacing. Your kind has terrible eyesight, you know.
“Well, it’s dark, Xin.” But he was there, scrambling up onto the rail of the closest ship, waving at her. Behind him, shadowy figures emerged from the hold of the ship, tentative, fearful. Whooping, Kir leaped from the rail as the dragon swam closer, splashing down into the water beside them, scrambling onto Xin’s back behind Tahlia.
“Wow, how did you do that?” He laughed, his eyes round. “It was like a winter storm all around me, Kark flying off the deck right and left. But I didn’t feel anything but a breeze.”
Of course not. The dragon sounded testy. I’m much more skillful than that, small-friend.
“I heard that.” Kir almost fell off, grabbed for Tahlia’s waist at the last second. “She can talk! I really didn’t believe …”
They both winced at Xin’s snort of laughter. I didn’t choose to talk to you before. You can talk to us if you want to. Not all can. Xin snorted again. You may find your own dragon-friend one day, small one.
Shadows moved in the grove. The survivors who had fled or hidden were coming down to the dock, as tentative as the captives on the empty Kark ships. Tahlia leaned forward. “Maybe you can convince other dragons to come back here, do you think?”
Perhaps. The dragon bent her head, considering. If we have people to speak with once more. She swam toward the grove, the returning villagers retreating with fear and wonder in their eyes.
The Dragaman’s Bride
ANDY DUNCAN
Andy Duncan made his first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1995, and quickly made others, to Starlight, Sci Fiction, Dying For It, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as several more sales to Asimov’s. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioners’ Guild” was on the final Nebula ballot in 2000, the first of his six Nebula nominations, and in 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. He also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2002 for his novella “The Chief Designer.” His other books include an anthology coedited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and a nonfiction guidebook, Alabama Curiosities. A graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle, he was raised in Batesburg, South Carolina, now lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, Sydney, and is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Frostburg State University. He has a blog at http://beluthahatchie.blogspot.com.
In the evocative, scary, and wryly funny story that follows, he takes us to the mountains of Virginia in the 1930s for some tall-tale telling at its best, in company with a brave young girl who is wise enough to know that if you would sup with the Devil—or even his son-in-law—you should use a long spoon … and also that love is where you find it, no matter who it’s with.
PROLOGUE
SHE’D been in sight for a half hour. As the sheriff labored up the slope, the pine trees dwindled in size, as if he were growing, so that he emerged at the bare crest a giant. The wind from Lost Spectacles Gap drove the rain into his face. The girl had not plunged down the other side into a fast escape, as he had hoped and feared, but instead had clambered westward along the rocky ridgeline of Cove Mountain, on an old goat track that was mostly boulders and scree. She was a hundred yards ahead, and her bare arms seemed to glow against the gray rocks and sky. She was bareheaded, too, but the red hair that had given her away downslope, before the skies opened, now was dark and ropy in the rain. Her soaked dress clung to her young woman’s body, the sheriff half saw and half imagined.
“C’mon down, honey,” he called. “That path’s a dead end.” As if he needed to tell Ash Harrell’s only child anything about Cove Mountain. It was what she knew; it was all she had to know. But his knees hurt, he was soaked and out of breath, and he did not want to sidle among these high rocks in the dark, as the gravel shifted beneath him. Downslope, he could see the flashlight of the next-to-useless deputy who followed as slowly as possible, in hopes the sheriff would give up and come back down.
“Only fraidy-cats are scared of the doctor,” the sheriff yelled. “I thought you were a big girl now. Aw, c’mon, child, there’s a hot stove waiting, and good rabbit stew.”
The receding bright spot on the ridge that was Allie Harrell did not stop or look around, but her voice cut through the rain and wind. “You eat it,” she called.
“Little bitch,” the sheriff muttered, as a peal of thunder seemed to shake the mountain. Did a girl, he wonder, holler like a boar hog when she got snipped? Flashlight in his left hand, he found a slick rock crevice with his right and hauled himself onto the path the girl had taken.
A lightning flash illuminated the end of the path: a jagged, moss-patched shard of quartzite that towered thirty-five feet above the western-most part of the ridge. Buzzard’s Rock, the landmark was called, though even the buzzards seemed to shun it. The Harrell girl stood at the base of the spire, at the top of a heap of boulders. G
ood God, surely she didn’t intend to jump? Was the prospect of the state hospital that terrifying?
The rain had slacked off some, and in only a few more steps he would be close enough to talk to her in a reasonable tone of voice. Hoping to distract her in the meantime, he shined the flashlight into her face. She squinted—and smiled at him.
“You come down from there right now,” he said. He took a step forward onto a flat rock that tipped sideways, so he stepped back to solid ground, keeping the flashlight on her. “I don’t want you falling and hurting yourself, ruining your pretty face.” Actually, she looked like a half-drowned wharf rat at the moment, the same as he probably did, but she was still pretty. Beautiful, even. As if reading his mind, she lifted a hand and tucked a hank of hair back behind her ear. The little flirt! You would think he had asked her to dance after a corn-shucking, when in fact he had ordered her to come down off a precipice in a storm. He edged closer, though everywhere he placed his feet seemed uncertain now.
“I just wanted to get you alone, Sheriff,” she said. “Come up here closer, so I can talk to you.”
Wet as he was, the sheriff felt his mouth go dry.
From the path behind came the voice of Deputy Larsen, with his customary poor timing: “Hang on, Sheriff Stiles, I’m coming.”
“You stay back there!” the sheriff cried.
“Well, how come?”
“Never mind how come.” The gravel beneath his left foot rolled sideways, and his leg followed it into nothing. He wrapped his arms around a boulder to keep from falling who knew how far. “I’m talking her down, you idiot. We’re negotiating.”
A crash of thunder. As the rain slackened, the thunder seemed to be getting louder—but would he have flinched so if it hadn’t been on the heels of a bald-faced lie? And her a mere slip of a hardscrabble girl, and him a respected man? As the thunder rolled out of earshot, it was replaced by another sound. Allie Harrell was laughing, a low chuckle that raised the sheriff’s short hairs.
“Negotiating,” she said. “Is that what they call it in town, Sheriff? On the mountain, we have other words for it.”
With some reluctance, the sheriff had let go of the boulder, freeing himself to creep around it to a spot directly beneath the girl. He shined the flashlight beam into her face, liked not at all what he saw there, then flicked it lower to see that she was leaning her elbows on a giant, tilted slab of rock that reared between the two of them. It was like a natural pulpit, and him in the front pew, looking up.
“Girl,” he said, his voice a croak. He licked his lips and tried again. “Girl, you don’t want me to come up there after you.”
She laughed again. “Don’t I?” she asked.
“Sheriff! You OK?”
And with those three words, Deputy Larsen almost killed him. At the moment the sheriff turned his head to reply, Allie Harrell, having for the past several minutes methodically pushed and pushed and pushed the full weight of her body against the rock slab while she dug away the gravel at its base with her feet, finally achieved her aim, and the slab began to fall forward, almost without noise. Only a preliminary patter of gravel prompted the sheriff to step back, onto one of those teeter-totter rocks. His ankle twisted, and he fell backward into space, arms outflung, flash-light flying, and so the toppled slab crashed into the rock where he had stood, a freshet of gravel and rainwater pouring down onto the rubble.
“Sheriff!” cried Deputy Larsen.
“Here!” called the sheriff. He lay amid the rocks ten feet down the slope, his feet uphill from his head. He hurt all over. He moved his limbs. Right arm probably broken, ankle certainly sprained. Larsen would have to get some help up here, a crew with a gurney—
Allie Harrell stood over him, hefting above her head a rock the size of a watermelon. Her ropy arm muscles bulged. But how was he able to see that? Where did this flickering light come from?
“Don’t,” the sheriff said.
“You thought you could sweet-talk me into some butcher-shop hospital,” she said. “I’d die first.”
“You don’t have to go,” the sheriff said. “It was a mistake.”
“Damn straight it was,” she said, raising the rock and stepping forward, “and you’ve stolen your last mountain girl.”
Behind her, seeming to rear up in that unholy light, was Larsen, his pistol aimed at the back of her head. He was grinning.
He cocked the pistol.
“No!” screamed the sheriff.
And then came the loudest thunder yet, a thunder that was not thunder, and the sheriff screamed again because of the fire, the fire that seared his face and his arm and the mountaintop and the sky, and as Deputy Larsen, guttering like a tallow candle, plunged past him over the edge, flailing and screaming, the sheriff blacked out. He would be weeks remembering what had happened, and weeks more trying to believe it.
MY name is Pearleen Sunday, though I was always called Pearl, and this is the story of how I followed an Old Fire Dragaman down a hole that another girl went down before me, and how one of us came up again. The story also has a wishing ring, and kidnappers, and an angry mob, and a car chase with one car, and a shoot-out, and, of course, a few ghosts, which I seem to attract, and it happened to me and around me and in spite of me in the Virginia mountains, where you stand on a ridge and see the next ridge real clear and the next ridge behind a little less clear and so on back, ridge after ridge, with the last one only a faint blue notion of a line, because it’s the farthest one away in distance and also the farthest one away in time. It’s the long-gone past of the mountains that you’re trying to scry, away off there. This story happened several ridges back, when the mountain folks were hearing stories from the cities of wait lines for bread, and padlocked banks, and jail time for drinking beer, and were glad of their rifles and turkey gobblers, their gold pieces hidden in shuck mattresses, their homemade whiskeys that played different tunes on the tongue from hill to hill and spring to spring.
One fall afternoon I sat in a bald patch on the slope of Cove Mountain, on some flat rocks that may once have been a cabin’s doorstep, to eat cheese and crackers from the store in Catawba and muse over the troubling things I had heard there. I spread my hat and jacket across the rocks because I needed the sun to warm my arms and the breeze to stir my hair, since no one else was like to bother, and marveled at the magic on display all around, as many reds and golds as there are sorrows and joys, and every last leaf a-trembling to burst into flame if you looked at it too long. So I kept my eyes moving. I sat in that bald for a spell, watching a hawk wheel overhead, a chipmunk skitter from rock to rock, a black belch of smoke rise on the other side of the trees. No homestead chimney puts out smoke like that—the puffs were too strong and regular, as if squeezed from a bellows—and the plume was moving slow to the east, so I knew it must be a locomotive headed along the N&W track. But something didn’t set right about that notion, and I plucked and chewed a grass blade while I figured why not. The first problem was I ought to hear the train rumbling and clanking along, but I heard no sound at all to go with that moving puff cloud. The second problem was even bigger: I had crossed the N&W a mile or so back, on the way up the hill. It lay behind me, not in front. So there was nothing for it but to ease up off my smooth rock and take up my hat and jacket and soogin sack and sidle through the trees to where I could make out, through a laurel bush, where that smoke was coming from. It was a man walking along the ridge smoking a pipe, only the pipe was the size of a man, and the man was a giant. His eyebrows stuck out from his craggy face like twin rolls of barbed wire, and they kept catching on the oak limbs, so that boughs and leaves and bits of bark pattered onto his shoulders and the tops of his rowboat-sized brogans. He hummed a tune as he walked, and as I watched him, holding my breath—because anyone who ran across an Old Fire Dragaman in the hills, even in those days, knew she had seen something not long for this world, something that deserved to pass in a hush—the giant stopped, took one last drag on his pipe, then knocked it empty on a
boulder that echoed Whack! Whack! like the chop of an ax. Enough dumped out with each Whack! to make an ash-Pearl my height and weight, but the Dragaman puffed out his cheeks and blew and scattered the ashes across the valley before their sparks could kindle a fire. Then he pulled from his coat pocket what looked like a saddlebag, from which he pinched a haystack of pipe tobacco between his thumb and long finger. This he put into the bowl of his pipe and tamped down. Then he hacked and coughed and brought up a little fireball, about the size of a frolicking calf, which played across the bowl and set it alight. The extra flames fell to the brush underfoot, where the Dragaman crushed them out with a sigh, like it was a shame to waste such a good fire. He hitched up his pant legs and sat on the ground with a thump like dynamite deep in a mine, and I sat down, too, because his sitting had rippled the mountainside and knocked me plumb off my feet. I came down on a sharp place, and I was sprawled beneath the laurel, rubbing my backside, when the Dragaman began to sing.
The coo-coo is a pretty bird
She warbles as she flies
She brings us good tidings
And tells us no lies.
It wasn’t the prettiest singing voice. It sounded like a man trying to sing around a mouthful of pebbles without spitting them out or swallowing them. But he sure knew a lot of verses to that old song, some changed around and others entirely new to me.
Way up on Cove Mountain
I wander alone
I’m as mean as the devil
Oh let me alone
I’ll eat when I’m hungry
I’ll drink when I’m dry
Dragon Book, The Page 52
