The Dragon Book (71 page)

“You don’t know that.” Slane stroked her hair back from her face. “It doesn’t matter how they got here. They are here. Stay low.” He pulled her down as she started to rise. “I have a boat hidden on the far side of the mat. As soon as it’s dark, we’ll leave. We have enough water, I think, to get us to the next grove. And if not, we’ll just have to catch fountain fish.”

“Badluck eyes.” She stared out at the dark ships, the busy to and fro of the raiders’ boats as they stripped the grove. “I’ll just bring it to the next grove.”

“
Stop
it!” He jerked her around to face him, his own eyes blazing. “You are our
hope
, don’t you see? You need to call your dragon back. The dragons kept the groves safe once. It can happen again. We’ve kept the strain of dragon-speakers alive. You have given us the key to the dragons.”

“Xin’s gone.” Tahlia looked down at the salt-crusted weed beneath her knees. “I sent her to … wherever they are.”

Slane was staring at her in stunned disbelief. “Can’t you call her back?”

She shook her head. All sense of the dragon was gone. As if she really had flown to the moon, like the old stories said.

“Well,” he said heavily. “We’ll still go. We have to. Maybe … she’ll come back to find you.”

She didn’t argue with him, nodded when he wanted her to agree, watched the slow descent of the sun as the boats went back and forth. They weren’t bringing any more captives now. They must have enough to power the boats. Until the next raid. The returning longboats were now full of bundles and fish-skin sacks of oil. Slane gave her some dried bluefish meat and a cup of water as the sun set, and she made herself eat and drink.

“Sleep for a little while,” he told her in a whisper, as the dusk thickened to full dark. “We’ll leave after the Crone takes her walk.”

She was already rising, her yellow lamp shedding a weak light across the water. It was still, the swells sluggish and oily, as if the sea itself grieved for the destruction of the grove. Tahlia listened, and, after a while, she heard Slane’s breathing change, deepen into sleep. Silently, she stripped to her belt and fish knife, crawled across the mat, and slid into the cool water.

It was as if the Crone aimed her lamp to guide Tahlia’s way, laying down a yellow shimmer of light that stretched like a path to the nearest ship. It loomed over her, impossibly tall, silent except for the slap and suck of water along the hull. All must be below, she thought. Except for guards. There would be guards. The Crone’s light touched the rail of the ship above her and gleamed on clumps of stone-clam sprouting on the sleek black planks of the ship’s hull. You had to scrape them off the canoes, or they’d foul it clear to the gunwale.

The Crone’s light picked out a stairway of clams. Tahlia stretched, grabbing the first clump, bracing her feet against the slick hull. The boat rolled gently in the slow swell, lifting her clear of the water as she reached for the next clump, got a toehold on the first clump. Her shoulders burned with the strain as she slowly, painfully, worked her way from clump to clump, afraid to look up, afraid to look down. Then, suddenly, she found herself at the deck. For a moment, her mind numb with effort, she could only stare at the low rail and the dark deck beyond. The Crone had hidden her light behind a cloud and all was black.

Footsteps slapped on the deck, and she flattened herself to the hull as a Kark walked by. A guard? She listened to his steps diminish, then slipped over the rail and crouched, trying to get her breath back. The Crone unveiled her lamp again, and Tahlia stifled a squeak as she found herself between two crouching shapes. The Crone’s light illuminated pale, fish-belly faces and glazed, unseeing eyes.

The captives. The ones that powered the ship. Tahlia’s stomach twisted with horror. Pale, unhealthy skin hung on bones, and no light of intelligence flickered in the glassy, golden eyes that seemed to look through her. For an awful moment, Tahlia thought the woman might be her mother. A softly glowing collar of ruby light ringed the captive’s throat, and shackles chained her ankles to the deck. Not her mother, no. The ruby collar pulsed with a thready irregular rhythm, like a heartbeat. A failing heartbeat. As she watched, it slowed, flickered, then darkened. The creature sagged slightly forward, its jaw dropping slowly.

Tahlia scrambled backward, swallowed a gasp as she backed into another captive. A man, this one seemed less drained, still healthy-looking, his eyes the sky color of the grove peoples. But they had the same flat, unseeing look. His collar pulsed strongly.

Voices sounded aft of the dead captive, coming closer. Someone laughed harshly, and Tahlia heard a sound like a blow. The Crone poured yellow light down on the dead captive as a silver-haired, gold-eyed Kark bent over the corpse and said something in a harsh, disgusted tone. Metal rattled as he unlocked the shackles. He removed the dull collar and picked the body up as if it weighed nothing. Tahlia shivered as he tossed her over the side like a piece of trash. He peered after, nodded as she splashed into the water, then snapped an order over his shoulder, his tone impatient.

Another Kark emerged from the shadows, dragging a small figure. Hands bound behind him, face crusted with dried blood, the boy kicked at the Kark with bound feet.

Kir.

The Kark dragging him stopped and raised a fist, but at his companion’s snarl, grunted and grabbed Kir’s ankles, dragging him facedown toward the waiting shackles. The Kark with the collar grabbed Kir by the hair, ready to put it around his neck.

Tahlia launched herself at him, knife in her hand. The blade caught the crouching Kark, the one who had dragged Kir, in the back, but it skated along his ribs. He leaped away with a howl, and Tahlia slashed at the other Kark’s eyes. He dropped the collar, scrambling back, yelling at the top of his lungs.

Sound erupted everywhere, and the Crone doused her lamp once more. Tahlia flung herself down, felt Kir’s writhing body beneath her. “It’s me.” She found the weed-fiber ropes binding his hands, slid the knife blade beneath it. Hands closed on her back, nails raking her skin as she twisted, slashing blindly with the knife. Her attacker yelped and leaped back. Someone shouted a hoarse order, and, suddenly, Kir was yanked away from her, yelling at the top of his lungs.

A dark shape loomed over her, and Tahlia leaped aside, ducking his grab. She leaped up to the rail, ran along it for a few steps. Oil lamps illuminated a dozen raiders. Some were grinning as they surrounded her, cutting her off on both sides. The Crone drifted from behind her veil of cloud, and Tahlia saw black boats below her in the water. No escape there, either. For a moment, time seemed to stand still. The Crone’s lamp seemed to float on the slow, dark swells, like a perfectly round pool of yellow light.

They flew away up to the moon.
The words of the old myth.

We don’t fly up
. Xin’s voice echoed in her head, full of hurt.

Tahlia flexed her legs and dove from the rail, arcing downward as the Kark howled and laughed, her stiff fingers cutting the yellow circle of light precisely in the center.

She kicked, disoriented for a moment, lungs burning as she swam down through a tunnel of golden light … no … she was swimming …
up
.

She broke the surface, blinked in sunlight, beneath blue sky. Pale birds circled overhead, and one fell like stone, splashing down with a gout of spray to emerge a moment later, flapping heavily, a silvery fish in its talons. A moment later, a familiar form burst from the water, the serpentine neck curving as it spied her, silvery scales gleaming in the sun.

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.

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. Good 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.