The Red Mother

by Elizabeth Bear

I put those tools down and picked up the spindle, dipped my finger in the silver, drew a loop across my open hand, and gave the spindle a twirl. It dropped, and I rubbed metal dust into the chain-ply of my brother’s life, making the thread into yarn that could be unwound from the spindle without unraveling.

  I supposed it didn’t matter, really, if the thread unwound itself—assuming Ragnar was telling the truth and Arnulfr and Bryngertha were dead. A poor omen perhaps for Arnulfr’s legend, but Arnulfr’s legend was the tale of a quiet man quietly damned for a crime by treachery. There are a lot of sagas about lawsuits. There aren’t too many about the losers of lawsuits.

  Being born again by dragon venom would be the most songworthy thing that had ever happened to him.

  Was Ragnar telling the truth? Well, I had known Ragnar to be sly, to misdirect, like any good warlord. I had not known him to betray his word of honor.

  Getting eaten by a dragon was a death worth singing. Maybe that would be enough of a legend to gain me admittance into one of the better heavens. Or maybe the End Storm would blow up while I was plying, and I wouldn’t have to worry about legends or kinsmen anymore.

  Having thought of songs, I sang to myself as I worked. As the ash fell around me. Songs for the goddesses who measured every man’s life, and then measured him for his coffin. Songs for the spinners. Warlock songs, seithr songs. Women’s songs, but there was no one to hear me except the basalt-colored gelding, and he was in no position to impugn my masculinity.

  At last, I was out of silver dust and all the yarn was plied. Gray, scratchy. Smelling faintly of lanolin and lye. I stretched it between my fingers and let it twirl into a skein. If there had been any sunlight beneath the ash plume, I might have detected a subtle sparkle in the twist.

  The basalt-colored horse dozed disconsolately at the end of his lead rope. I’d bored him to sleep.

  I hoped it wasn’t a comment on my singing.

  I let him sniff the skein, which he did with curiosity but no apparent concern. That was a relief. Some animals will not abide the smell of sorcery.

  I started by braiding his mane, working the fate-cord into it as I went. I wound the line around his chest and shoulders like a girl binding her wooden horse with thread to make a play-harness. He stood for it, remarkably still and even-tempered. I braided traces back on themselves without cutting the line and let them trail, then bound the whole thing off just as I ran to the end of the thread.

  The horse craned his neck around to watch me, ears alert, eyes bright and expression dubious. I wished I had a walking stick or a long bone from which to make a whiffletree, but it would only drag on the ground. And probably spook even this horse. So I just draped the traces over his rump and tied them in a little bow.

  It was, after all, the symbolism that mattered.

  “Well, buddy, I hope this works,” I said.

  He blew a warm breath over me. We resumed climbing the cone.

  * * *

  The slope leveled as we came close to the top of the volcano. We stopped to drink at a spring that bubbled up from a cluster of stones, clearing some of the ash from our throats. I splashed water on my face. It was lukewarm and fizzed like surf, full of bubbles. It reeked and tasted of brimstone, but at least it wasn’t boiling. The horse drank, snorted to clear the fumes from his nostrils, and gave me a look before drinking again as if to say, “Yeah, I’ve seen worse.”

  When I lifted my head, I realized we were nearly to the vent. The horse grew increasingly restive as we came up the final slope, and with a couple furlongs to go he planted his feet in their ridiculous leather bags and refused to walk another step.

  I chirruped to him and shook the lead. He planted his hind feet, rocked back, and reared. Not a dramatic, sky-pawing rear, but a clear declaration that he was not moving.

  It was honestly surprising we’d made it this far. “Good lad,” I told him, and turned him around to face downhill. I wound the fragile-seeming traces around a head-sized piece of pumice and tied them off.

  Careful not to loop the lead rope around my hand, I stepped up beside the twitching horse and unfastened his halter. I stroked his sweating, ash-gritted shoulder as I slid the straps off his nose. He stood harnessed in sorcery, fate-threads, and kin-duty, leaning against the yarn-spun traces as if against a plow stopped by thick turf.

  I stepped away and tossed the halter onto the cinders before turning back uphill. I cupped my hands to my mouth and used a little twist of luck, a scrap of thread wound ’round my fingers, to shift the wind so that my voice would carry. I took the deepest breath I could, tightened my diaphragm, and bellowed.

  “Here, dragon, dragon! Nice fat pony. Lame, too! An easy dinner!”

  For a long moment, nothing. The reek of fumes swirling on the breeze I’d conjured up; the steam rising from the cinders. The vast silence of the lifeless mountainside.

  Then came a rumble, and a long hard clatter like a bag of armor bits and chopped-up candelabras dragged over stone. The scraping of stone on stone. I levered my neck back, peering through streaming vapors, blinking away the fume-begotten tears.

  A great head that only seemed small because it was on a neck as long as a ship’s mast poked over the rim of the crater. The head was hammer-shaped, and scaled, and horned, and fanged. I could have called it red or orange in color and not been wrong, but the rough scales seemed translucent, and refracted rainbows in their depths, like the planes of light struck within an opal. Even under the dim overcast of smoke and the haze of fumes, it dazzled.

  The owner of the head—and the neck—sniffed deeply. Once, twice. Then it reared back and struck with surprising speed.

  I threw myself to the side, cinders bruising my palms. The horse, being nobody’s fool, took off. I winced for his bad foot, because I am a soft, womanish fool of a sorcerer. He galloped down the slope with all the alacrity and focus of a horse running Hel-bent away from a dragon, the boulder bouncing behind him in its traces. The glamour that I’d spun and sung and knotted around both horse and stone caught on the weave of threads and mirror-bright silver scrapings and made it seem the whole mountainside was collapsing into a vast horseshoe depression. The basalt-colored horse was just one more boulder bouncing along in the midst of the rest.

  I was rather proud of the effect, and the way the sound of hoofbeats was lost in the simulated rumble of the rockslide.

  I turned my attention back to the dragon as it pulled back again and took a long, slow sniff. Red nostrils flared darker in the fire-faceted muzzle. The upper lip drew back to move air across the palate and a forked tongue flickered.

  Steam hissed from its nostrils. My vision swam with acrid tears. The head swung down again, falling toward me like the hammer it resembled.

  If I’d been some hero out of sagas I’d have swung up a sword, or had a venomed spear at the ready. I just raised my empty hands as if that could somehow fend off an avalanche.

  The blow stopped before it fell, the dragon’s enormous head so close that the heat of its hide and breath curled my hair. I smelled the ends scorching.

  The dragon spoke, and despite the shape of tongue and mouth it surprised me by uttering words I could understand completely. Its phrasing was archaic, its voice as deep and hollow as caverns.

  “I smell a horse,” it said. “But much closer, I smell a witch. Hello, little witch. That was a clever thing, for a wisp such as you.”

  Well, I had been hoping to impress it. And I’d lured it out all right.

  Now what?

  It sniffed again. “Have you come to slay a dragon?”

  A bead of saliva gathered along the edge of the dragon’s lip. I stepped to the side as it dripped, stretching a long thread behind it. The venom looked like honey glowing in the sun, but when it touched the ground it sizzled on the ash. The spot smoked slightly.

  I thought about the jars in my pack and felt as cold as if the blood were draining from my body.

  I gulped down the lump in my throat. “I came to bargain with one.
You see I carry no spear, no harpoon—”

  The rumble of the dragon’s words shook my diaphragm. “If you wish gold, I will not give it. If you wish ancient and storied weapons, there is nothing you can give me that I could not take. If you wish to die gloriously and be remembered in song, you should have brought a poet. You reek of sorcery. ”

  “As long as I don’t smell like a snack. ”

  “Hmmm.” It tilted its head to one side. “You smell pickled and stringy.”

  The wings rustled as it shrugged.

  Perhaps it was not strange that the dragon’s verbal jousting made me feel as if I had come from the wilderness into a safe and familiar hall. I was comfortable in an argument. The fear and tension drained away and in their place a manic energy buoyed me.

  I crouched and held my hand over the smoking eitr. I turned my face up to the dragon. I was gray with ash and streaked with tears.

  I felt the warmth of the poison and the warmth of the ashes on which it rested as if I held my hand over gentle coals. “I’ve come to bargain for this.”

  The great head tilted and drew back. The lambent eyes with their shattered planes of iridescent scarlet and vermilion blinked lazily. “I could give you more of it than you wished for, little witch.”

  “Your presence here, your awakening of the volcano—they’ve brought a blight upon the land. Men and women have died of illness and hunger. The cattle will die as well, if the grass is buried under ash and pumice, or they will choke on the poison fumes of the volcano. I have been asked to win your eitr to bring back those who have died.”

  “Cattle die and kinsmen die, little witch. If they cannot live in a place, then they should go.”

  “Look,” I said bluntly, “what can we give you to leave this place and not return?”

  “What can you offer me? A fat horse is all very well, but I can fetch my own when I want one. I have … commitments that will keep me in this lair.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not long,” said the dragon. To my amazement, it placed first one and then the other enormous talon on the rim of the vent. Having done so, it settled its head between them, bringing its eye level down to mine. I could see the great humped shoulders, the leathery folds stretching back from its forelimbs. Like a bat’s, they seemed both wing and foot to walk upon. Unlike a bat’s, they shimmered with all the colors of flame.

  It tilted its head and rippled the taloned fingers as if counting. “Hmm. Perhaps a hundred seasons more.”

  Well, twenty-five years of active volcano and dragon occupation would certainly put paid to the village—and all life within miles. I rose to my feet and discovered that the air was slightly better up there. Apparently the fumes were heavy.

  “Assume for a moment that I can get you whatever you desire,” I said. “If you will only leave this place, and give me some of your venom.”

  The dragon curved its sinuous neck like a goose and glanced over its shoulder, back down the length of its body into the vent. I wondered if it were assessing a hoard I could not see. I wondered how anything remained unmelted, down in the hot mouth of the earth.

  It turned back. With a sigh, it said, “I have no need of human treasures.”

  “This obligation you mentioned—is there a way I could help you fulfill it?”

  If you have never seen a dragon throw its head back and laugh (and I suppose very few have), it is a sight not easily described. I hastily tugged my hat down as a fine mist of caustic venom descended around me. A few invisible drops smarted on the backs of my hands.

  “You are not boring, little witch,” the dragon said. It looked this way, and then that. To my amazement, it seemed to be making a show of casualness, of reluctance.

  “Hmm,” it said. Then: “Do you like riddles, little witch?”

  I closed my eyes.

  I hated riddles.

  “I have played at riddles a time or two.”

  “Well then.” The dragon shifted its weight, settling into the mountainside like a great jarl settling into his broad, bearskin-adorned chair. “Come up a little closer, witch, and choose a stone to sit upon, and we can play at riddles for what you wish. But if you win, you must grant me a boon.”

  How under the Wolf Sun of my fathers did I keep getting myself into situations like this?

  But I was a man on kin-business, blood-bound to do what I could. Damn my brother anyway, for being a simple farmer, for being the victim of a brutal scheme, for dying of a dragon’s miasma, for getting me into all of this.

  I walked up to the smoking crater as if I had not a fear in the world—certainly without any cringing as I came under the shadow of the dragon’s wings—and while I was selecting a rock of the correct height for sitting, could not resist a peek over the edge into the vent.

  I almost fell in.

  I had expected the vent to contain … shining masses of gold, perhaps. Seething masses of lava.

  Not a careful circle of boulders each as big as a cart, and a claw-raked ground of soft ash within, like a giant’s campfire ring. Upon that, dead in the center, lay three enormous mottled eggs like the last remaining embers.

  The dragon, it seemed, was not an it but a she.

  “Well,” I said. “I see what you mean by ‘obligations.’”

  Have you ever heard a dragon chortle? I have, and it was in no way rendered less unsettling by the knowledge that this was a female with young. For nothing on the waters and the wide wide world is fiercer than a mother.

  I found a rock, as directed, and as directed I seated myself upon it. I swung the pack with the jars down between my knees and set it gently on the stones.

  “So, little witch,” said the dragon. “Shall we play?”

  “You go first,” I said. “Best two out of three?”

  The dragon stretched and sighed, settling itself. “I believe it is traditional. As for that boon—”

  “As long as it’s not my stringy hide.”

  She sniffed. “I dislike the taste of woad, and I see from your forelimbs that you’re pricked all over with the stuff.”

  I glanced down at the old and faded ropes of tattoos. They were meant to be for protection, to ensure the forbearance of the gods.

  First time in my life that the damn things actually worked.

  “If you get a boon if I win,” I said, “I get a boon if I lose.”

  “It can’t be the same as the stakes,” she said cagily.

  “What forfeit will you have of me if you win?” I pushed my hat back as she thought about it.

  “Have you a hoard?” she asked, finally.

  I thought of gold and silver and jewels of great store. The wealth of a lifetime spent riding the whale-roads, reaving and trading. The price of my retirement, when I found a place I wanted to retire. All safe in a vault down in Ornyst, where there were bankers and banks.

  I thought about kin-duty. I thought about my sister-in-law.

  “Not on my person,” I said.

  “Wager your hoard against my venom, then,” the dragon invited.

  “Don’t you even want to know how much I have?”

  She hissed a laugh. “It’s enough that it’s valuable to you. That’s what makes a wager interesting. That, and the story that attaches to it. That someday I may say to my children, yes, this is the gold I won riddling with a sorcerer, while you were yet in the shell.”

  It was a dragonish way of thinking, and not so alien to anybody who had gone a-viking. I touched my arm-rings, fingering them until I found the one that had been a gift from Ragnar when he was a sea-king and I sailed at his command. When we had been bright and young and too naïve to know any better.

  I said, “If you will wager both your venom and your leaving, I will add my adornments to the pot. Those mean more to me than any hoard.”

  None of it was the richest that I owned, but it was enough—ear-rings and arm-rings, the brooch that closed my cloak and the clasp that pinned my hair—to lend me dignity. I felt a sentiment for each object.
Especially since I had so recently won it all back from a murderer.

  At least it wasn’t my coat and boots this time.

  “Your folk should move on, not me. This land is far more suitable for me than…”

  There are few things more eloquent than the dismissive flick of a dragon’s talon, it turns out.

  “That’s likely true,” I admitted. “But you have to understand that the people of the village have built houses and barns and planted crops. Our lives are short. They won’t have time or resources to up stakes and build those houses anew someplace else.”

  She said, “There are far more suitable places for your sort to live than there are for brooding eggs. I won’t be the last to come here, so long as the earth stays hot.”

  “I can’t wager for my folk any more than you can speak for yours.” I hoped she wasn’t a dragon Queen, or something, who did have the power to bargain for the whole. Anyway, the future wasn’t my concern. She was right; this was a stupid place for a settlement.

  She huffed at the back of her throat, not hard enough to spray venom—but hard enough to cause a mist of it to curl from her nostrils and ignite into a transparent lash of flame. She tilted her head to regard me, and I got the oddest sense that her interest was more in the bargaining and the company and the game than in who lost or won.

  Sitting on eggs must be extremely boring for a creature with wings to span the open skies. I’d only had the broad sails and swift rowers of a dragon-boat to carry me, and although now my joints ached even in good weather and my feet hurt every day, I could not bring myself to settle into a farmstead and raise cows. Though I was no youth to harden my muscles on an oar without injury, I could not see myself raising a hall and draping a big throne-chair with wolf-hides and bear-hides to cushion my ass and seem fierce at the same time. No matter how much the saddle galled my behind.

  I might have more in common with this dragon than I did with Ragnar or with my brother.

  Damn Arnulfr.

  “Done,” the dragon said. “I shall begin.

  “I am the shrill singer

  “Who rides a narrow road.