Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  MARGO LANAGAN is the author of three story collections, White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes, and the novel Tender Morsels. Black Juice won two World Fantasy Awards, was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and was short-listed for, among other awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Red Spikes was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year for Older Readers in 2007.

  Margo lives in Sydney, Australia, with her partner and their two teenage sons. She has a rather dusty history degree and has worked various jobs, including freelance book editing and technical writing.

  Visit her blog at amongamidwhile.blogspot.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every year my partner Steven and I design and edit an anthology of writing and pictures by primary school children of the Murray-Darling Basin, the river system that occupies much of southeastern Australia. One year there was a piece written by Harrison Fridd, aged eight, of Waikerie in South Australia. It began, “The ferry on the river is where my dad works. Most of the day he takes people back and forth across the river.” My brain went to the most famous ferryman of them all, Charon, who poles the souls of the dead across the rivers of Hell, and when Harrison went on to mention that he sometimes saw his dad on the ferry in the mornings on the way to school, I had the story of the child who nips down into Hell to take her ferryman dad his lunch. I liked the combination of the gruesome job and the cosy family errand. I had no idea the gruesomeness was going to take over so thoroughly. Honest!

  THE GHOSTS OF STRANGERS

  NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

  Elexa had been up the mountain to see her mother’s dragon once. Her father took her and her older brother Kindal when they were very small, just after their mother drowned in a storm-swollen river. The dragon had raised her children already, with Elexa’s mother’s help; after Mother died, the dragon waited only long enough to meet Elexa and Kindal before flying away forever.

  Her mother’s dragon terrified Elexa. The dragon was huge to a three-year-old child, a great dark thing with a mouth full of flame and spears, and dark pearl eyes. She did not speak to them; she reared up before her shadowy cave, spread her wings, belled a mourning wail. Heat came off her stronger than the warmth of a winter stove. Elexa hid behind her father, who spoke formal words in the human approximation of dragonspeech, words full of hisses and gravel. The dragon did not look directly at them. She faced them, though, long enough to weep five ruby tears, before turning and retreating into her cave. Father knelt and collected the stones. He gave three to Kindal and two to Elexa. “It is her mourning gift,” he whispered. “Hold these when you feel your sorrow.”

  For the next year, Elexa slept curled on her straw pallet with the rubies in her hands. They were the first stones that spoke to her.

  The first human ghost Elexa caught was the ghost of old Peder, the village headman, the night he died. She was six. The whole village gathered together to worry about old Peder, who had been their leader for forty years. Everyone but Peder and his wife said prayers at the temple of the mountain god for Peder’s health to return, for two days and nights, until Peder sent his wife to ask them to stop. Peder had spoken with his stomach, and it told him that this time he would not recover; he should leave this life and move on to another.

  After that, everyone vigiled together around old Peder in the gatherhouse. He lay on a pallet near the storytelling firepit, the fire low, with his wife and daughters beside him, and everyone else waited with them, drowsing, quiet, respectful. The rattle came after the middle of the night, his last unquiet breaths. Elexa saw the ghost ease out of him, a white-gray cloud shaped vaguely like a person. She sent out her mental net before she thought, wrapped him up, and pulled him to her.

  “What? What?” he said. “What are you doing to me, Daughter? ”

  She glanced around to see if anybody else heard his questions. Everyone had their heads bowed, praying for Peder’s next journey.

  She rose and walked out of the gatherhouse, into the chilly night, his ghost trailing her like a fish on a line in a river of air. She sat on the worn stone steps of the mountain god’s temple and pulled the headman’s ghost beside her, loosening her net so he could take human form. He settled onto the stair, a gray-white shape, like the snow sculptures they built in midwinter, rough outlines of people and dragons, gods and animals. His eyes were dark pits; only a tingling flavor told Elexa who he was.

  “What has happened?” Peder asked. “I no longer feel ill. There’s no hurt in me. Yet I can’t walk where I want. Why did I follow you? How am I flying?”

  “You’re a ghost,” Elexa said.

  He held out his arms, stared at his blurry hands, turned his head to look at her. “I feel stranger than I can understand,” he said. He pushed against her ghost net. “This is what we do to the ghosts of animals? I hear a call. I know there’s a farther place I can go without walking. It is like a door with light beyond it. But your net holds me, Elexa. You stop me.”

  She gripped one hand with the other, thought of Peder the old man, presiding over village meetings when the men talked about hunting problems or the women discussed plans for the spring planting. He settled disputes about goats and sheep, chickens and apples, hunting rights when any argued over who could hunt dragon prey in this meadow or that. He assigned unpleasant tasks so no one had to do them all the time. He read the weather and the sky and told people when to plant. Peder was the one who led the children into the forest when they were five, six, seven, taught them which plants could be picked for food, which ones they should never touch. He showed them how to tell one tree from another by the shape and smell of the leaves, the form of the flowers, the texture of the bark, the way the branches grew. He tutored everyone in dragonspeech during long nights around the storytelling firepit.

  Everything he did, he did for the village.

  “I’ll let you go,” she said, and reached out to unweave the threads of her net.

  “Wait.”

  She halted.

  “Take me to my dragon,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She stopped at the cottage and got her robe and fur-lined boots. Peder had died in early spring, and the night air was full of wet cold. She didn’t yet have the thicker, slightly scale-patterned skin of those who had dragon bonded, so she wasn’t as impervious to flame and cold as she would be after she turned thirteen. She got her walking stick, too, and then she headed for the path up to the terraces.

  She was frightened. The grown mother dragons were as big as five or six humans. They cast racing, winged shadows when they flew over the village. She had looked up often as they flew overhead, memorized the patterns of colors on the undersides of their wings and bellies, learned to recognize which dragons had bonded to which boys and girls, which fledglings belonged to which mothers. Dragons often landed on the village center ground to pick up the day’s catch from their bonded humans, saving the humans a trip up the mountain. Elexa watched them from the shelter of the smithy or the door to the gatherhouse. She had never gone close to them on her own.

  She wasn’t alone now, was she? Peder was with her. Peder, and all the stories the others whispered on fall and winter nights when they huddled together in the gatherhouse, spinning thread or shelling nuts or grinding flour, about how their village was special and strange, different from other human villages and cities.

  In other places, stories said, female dragons ate humans.

  Male dragons, who only visited the terraces during mating season unless they were village-born, were wild and untrustworthy; they never bonded and were always a threat, unless they were the nestlings of local dragons; then they might know the rules, or they might have forgotten them on purpose. During mating season, the humans spent daylight hours in their houses, sheltered the domestic animals in caves or low-roofed structures so they couldn’t be seen from the air, and crept out at night, while dragons slept. Some of the wilder males dove at human houses, but older, past-egg-laying-a
ge bonded females guarded the village. They drove the wilder males away.

  Fortunately, mating season came at the tail end of winter, when there was little work in the fields, and it lasted only three weeks at most.

  The stories lasted forever.

  The darkest stories spoke of ravening dragons who dropped from the sky and carried off humans in their claws. Dragons who flamed, burned fields and houses, cooked people as they ran. Dragons who—

  Elexa faltered on the path halfway to First Terrace.

  “Don’t worry,” said old Peder’s ghost. “The males have already left. It’s sleep time.”

  She stumbled on, upward. At the edge of First Terrace, she looked around. Cave mouths gaped against the cliff wall across the terrace. Bones of game animals stood in piles near each cave, and smoke drifted from the caves. She smelled sulfur, burlap, cinnamon, rotten meat, and hot metal. Sleepy chirps came from a nearby cave, and the murmur of a dragon mother, the rustle of wings spread and settled.

  “That way.” Peder gestured toward the left.

  Elexa walked on the outer edge of the terrace, as far from the caves as she could.

  “Here,” said Peder. He indicated a cave.

  Elexa rubbed at her throat until she could swallow, then approached the cave. “Greetings, O great one,” she said, the first phrase she had learned in the tongue of dragons. It scratched and rattled in her mouth.

  Deep in the cave, a stirring, the scrape of talons on rock. A wave of heat flowed from the cave. Then a narrow head on a long snaky neck emerged, the snout wreathed in waving whiskers; streams of smoke flowed from the nostrils; the eyes great, glowing yellow-green jewels.

  “Who disturbs my sleep?” asked the dragon in a deep, menacing voice. She spoke human more clearly than any dragon Elexa had overheard in the village center ground.

  “Please, Grandmother, it’s me, Elexa. Old Peder told me to bring his ghost here.”

  “His ghost?” The dragon paced out of the cave past her, a dark hissing presence as her belly slid across the rocks, her six legs striking sparks with their steel-tipped talons, her muscular, snakelike tail whipping back and forth. She ran to the edge of the terrace and raised her wings, rattled them against the sky. She belled, then, a low, loud cry like metal striking metal that resonated for a long while after. As the sound faded, other dragons came from their caves. Old Peder’s dragon belled again, and the others cried out, too, a cacophony of notes sliding in and out of each other, jangling, stunning. Elexa covered her ears with her hands, but the sound went right through her, jittering her bones. Once more the dragon belled, and the others called after her. She turned and came back to Elexa.

  “My human is dead?” she said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve brought me his ghost?”

  “He asked me to.” Old Peder stood at her shoulder now, silent.

  “You, an unbonded child, can speak with ghosts?”

  Elexa dipped her head. Was that a bad thing? Everyone she knew had some ghost awareness, though others had less than she had. What if everyone else was half blind and deaf for a good reason? Would this huge, fire-breathing creature eat her? “Peder is the first human ghost I’ve spoken to,” she whispered.

  “Does he give himself to me?” asked the dragon.

  Elexa looked at old Peder’s ghost.

  “I fed her and the children the ghosts of so many rats and mice and rabbits,” he said. “I never knew what they got from it. She needed them, and they made her stronger, but I never understood how. I could go through that door to the light, Elexa, but maybe this is a better thing to do. Yes, I give myself to her.”

  “He says he does,” Elexa said.

  “Can you bring him to me, child?”

  Elexa flexed her mental net, directed it toward the dragon. Old Peder flew across the space to settle just in front of the dragon’s snout.

  “Are you sure?” Elexa asked.

  “Sure enough, I guess,” said old Peder.

  “He’s just in front of you,” Elexa said. She released her net as the dragon’s maw gaped, big enough for a person to walk into. Red light from internal flames flickered in the dragon’s throat. Her teeth were long and iron-colored, and her tongue lay like a two-headed snake in the bed of her long, long mouth.

  Peder stepped into her mouth. She shut her jaw, swallowed, a wave traveling down that long, pale throat, and said, “Oh! Oh, Peder, my lad. Ahhhh.” Her great eyes closed, and she laid her head on the ground between her front legs, her neck an upward arch. Small, panting puffs of smoke came from her nose.

  Elexa knelt ten feet from the dragon. Had she killed the mother? Had she destroyed Peder’s hope of happiness in his next life?

  A chill wet wind danced over the terrace, tugged on her hair and the edges of her robe. It crept in under the robe to freeze her arms and legs. Her face went numb.

  Presently the dragon opened her eyes again, and in the yellow glow of her jeweled eyes, faint blue streaks flickered. “Elexa,” said the dragon. Her breath was a warm, smoke-scented wind.

  “Grandmother,” Elexa said. Her teeth knocked together.

  “Elexa,” said the dragon again. She took several steps toward Elexa. “I am more than your dragon grandmother; Peder is part of me, too. I know you now.”

  Elexa’s face was thawing from the warmth the dragon radiated, but there was a chill inside her. “Old Peder?” she murmured.

  “Yes,” said the dragon.

  “Is this a good thing?”

  The dragon lifted her head, pointed her snout to the sky. She coughed a spurt of flame, then three huffs of smoke. She was laughing. “It is glorious,” she said. She scuttled closer and rubbed the top of Elexa’s head with the underside of her chin. Strands of Elexa’s hair caught in the dragon’s scales and singed because of the heat, leaving a foul smell. Elexa cringed.

  “I forgot. You’re not yet bonded,” muttered the dragon, sounding like Peder. She backed away. “Elexa, you have special skills. When others die, ask them whether they want to go through the door to the light or to this kind of afterlife. Now I know that sometimes our ghosts come here on their own and join with their bonded ones, for my dragon has known this to happen before, but only by chance. She tells me it was how the dragon settlement started here ages ago, a gift of ghosts from our village; it is why we can talk with these dragons, when no one else in our part of the world knows the way of it. Be a guide to the other dead in the village when they need you.”

  In the village below, one of the women started the death chant, a long wavering cry that turned corners, then went back. A second voice joined the first. They must have washed and prepared old Peder’s body for viewing, farewells, and burning. Elexa crept to the edge of the terrace and looked down at all the dark cottages rubbing shoulders with each other, gathered around the center ground and the gatherhouse like a ring of stones around a firepit, with the mountain god’s temple off to the side, near the forest. Smoke drifted from the gatherhouse’s smoke hole, lit by the flicker of flames below; it was the only building with any light in it. One voice rose and fell, the other echoing it two notes later, an outpouring of grief in the night.

  “Yan will take care of you,” the dragon said, staring down at the village past Elexa’s shoulder.

  Elexa sighed. She didn’t like Yan, the young man Peder had chosen to replace himself as village headman. Yan was more scornful than gentle. He had no patience with the mistakes of the young, and his plant lore was superficial. However, he drove hard bargains with the peddlers who came over the passes in the spring and summer, and he was strong. He knew how to shoot arrows, how to throw knives, how to build walls. He had bonded with the biggest dragon on the mountain. If danger came up the trail from the south, Yan’s dragon would help him fight it. And most of the village elders had approved him. The few who objected weren’t powerful enough to change old Peder’s choice.

  “Get some rest,” murmured the dragon.

  Elexa touched the dr
agon’s snout, then snatched back scorched fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” said the dragon. “When you’re bonded, that will change.”

  That promise sent Elexa down the mountain.

  Since that time, she had spoken to several other village ghosts. Three were children, unbonded, and she had let them go. The village midwife and the smith and the teacher had wanted to go up the mountain to their dragons, so Elexa took them, and watched as they seeped into their dragons and the dragons changed. Only the weary goatherd had wanted to drift away and not join his dragon mother.

  Elexa had seen other human ghosts. They were those confused on the trail to their next life, the ones who wandered.

  She snatched the first one she saw almost by reflex. He had died after killing many women. He had come from a large seaside settlement far to the south. His own people had killed him once they discovered what he was. To Elexa’s ghost and jewel senses, he tasted sour and coppery, and he terrified her at first, until she knew for sure her net could hold him helpless, no matter how much he struggled. She didn’t know how to release him. What if his ghost could kill her?

  She kept him for a long time, and he told her stories of what life was like there by the sea, a vast water that tasted of salt, with ships always traveling in and out of the harbor, bringing new strange things on every tide. House wizards spun houses out of sand, and everyone drank hot water flavored with leaves from another country. People ate things with tentacles and wore bright metal chains around their necks, arms, and waists. There, dragons were horrifying, dropping down at ill-favored celebrations and weddings to snatch up children and carry them off.