Dragonfield (2 page)

“Tansy,” he called softly, warning her of his coming.

A gull screamed back at him. He dropped his eyes to the hatchmarked tracks of shorebirds in the mud, waited a moment to give her time to answer, and then when none came, called again. “Tansy. Child.”

“Da, Da, here!” It was the voice of a young woman, breathless yet throaty, that called back. “And see what I have found. I do not know what it is.”

The reeds parted and she stepped onto the grass. Her skirts were kilted up, bunched at her waist. Even so they were damp and muddy. Her slim legs were coated with a green slime and there was a smear of that same muck along her nose and across her brow where she had obviously wiped away sweat or a troublesome insect. She held up a sheaf of red grassy weeds, the tops tipped with pink florets. Heedless of the blisters on her fingers, she gripped the stalk.

“What is it?” she asked. “It hurts something fierce, but I’ve never seen it before. I thought you might know.”

“Drop it. Drop it at once, child. Where are your mitts?”

At his cry, she let the stalk go and it landed in the water, spinning around and around in a small eddy, a spiral of smoke uncurling from the blossoms.

He plucked her hand toward him and reached into his belt-bag. Taking out a cloth wrapped packet of fresh aloe leaves, he broke one leaf in two and squeezed out the healing oils onto her hands. Soon the redness around the blisters on her fingers was gone, though the blisters remained like a chain of tiny seed pearls.

“Now will you tell me what it is?” she asked, grinning up at him despite what he knew to be a terribly painful burn. There was a bit of mischief in her smile, too, which kept him from scolding her further about her gloves.

“I have never seen it before, only heard of it. I thought it but a tale. It is called fireweed or flamewort. You can guess why. The little blisters on the hand are in the old rhyme. It grows only where a great dragon lives, or so the spellbook says:

They used it somehow in the dragon wars. But child, look at your hands!”

She looked down for the first time and caught her breath as she saw the tiny, pearly sores. “One, two, three … why there must be fifteen blisters here,” she said, fascinated. “Sores of pearl indeed. But what is its use?”

Her father shook his head and wrapped the aloe carefully. “I cannot imagine, since the sting of it is so fierce. And if the note about it be true, it will burn for near an hour once the florets open, burn with a hot steady flame that cannot be put out. Then it will crumble all at once into red ash. So you leave it there, steaming, on the water and come home with me. There is
no use
for dragon’s bane, for there are no more dragons.”

The fireweed had already lost its color in the river, graying out, but still it sent up a curl of blue-white steam. Tansy found a stick and pushed it towards the stalk and where she touched, the weed flared up again a bright red. When she pulled back the stick, the color of the weed faded as quickly as a blush. The stick burned down towards Tansy’s fingers and she dropped it into the river where it turned to ash and floated away.

“Dragon’s bane,” she whispered. “And I wonder why.” She neglected to mention to her father that there was a large patch of the weed growing, hidden, in the reeds.

“Such questions will not win you favor at home,” her father said, taking her unblistered hand in his. “Especially not with your dear May-Ma ready to do your chores. She will chide you a dozen times over for the same thing if we do not hurry home.”

“My chores!” Tansy cried. Then she shrugged and looked at her father with wise eyes. “Even if I were home to do them, I would hear of it again and again. Poor May-Ma, she speaks to herself for none of the rest of us really talks to her.” She pulled away from him and was gone up the path as if arrowshot.

He chuckled aloud and walked to the water’s edge to pick some fresh peppermint and sweet woodruff for teas. The river’s slow meandering was still noisy enough that he did not hear the strange chuffing sound of heavy new wings above him. It was only when the swollen shadow darkened the ground that he looked up and into the belly of a beast he had thought long extinct. He was so surprised, he did not have time to cry out or to bless himself before dying. The flames that killed him were neither long nor especially hot, but fear and loathing added their toll. The healer was dead before his body touched earth. He never felt the stab of the golden claws as the dragon carried him back to its home on the far spit of land.

Only the singed open herb bag, its contents scattered on the path, bore testimony to the event.

They did not look for him until near dark. And then, in the dark, with only their small tapers for light, they missed the burned herb sack. It was morning before they found it and Sage had run off to their closest neighbors for help.

What help could be given? The healer was gone, snatched from the good earth he had so long tended. They could not explain the singed sack, and so did not try. They concentrated instead on his missing body. Perhaps he had fallen, one man suggested, into the river. Since he was not a fisherman, he could not swim. They expected his body to fetch up against an island shore within a few days. Such a thing had happened to men before. The fisherfolk knew where to look. And that was all the comfort the villagers had to lend. It was harvest, after all, and they could spare only the oldest women to weep and prepare funeral pies.

“And what kind of funeral is it?” May-Ma asked repeatedly. “Without a body, what kind of burial? He will be back. Back to laugh at our preparations. I know it. I know it here.” She touched her breast and looked out to the garden’s edge and the large, newly-cut stone overshadowing the three smaller ones. “He will be back.”

But she was the only one to hold out such hope and to no one’s surprise but May-Ma’s, the healer did not return. The priest marked his passing with the appropriate signs and psalms, then returned to help with the harvest. The girls wept quietly: Rosemary by her loom, dampening the cloth; Sage by the window, gazing off down the path; Tansy alone in the woods. May-Ma sobbed her hopes noisily and the villagers, as befitting their long friendship with the healer, spoke of his Gift with reverence. It did not bring him back.

The healer’s disappearance became a small mystery in a land used to small mysteries until after the harvest was in. And then Tam-the-Carpenter’s finest draft horse was stolen. A week and a half later, two prize ewes were taken from Mother Comfy’s fold. And almost two weeks after that, the latest of the cooper’s twelve children disappeared from its cradle in the meadow when the others had left it for just a moment to go and pick wild trillium in the dell. A great fear descended upon the village then. They spoke of ravening beasts, of blood-crazed goblins, of a mad changeling beast-man roaming the woods, and looked at one another with suspicion. The priest ranted of retribution and world’s end. But none of them considered dragons, for, as they knew full well, the last of the great worms had been killed in the dragon wars. And while none had actually seen a goblin or a beast-man, and while there had not been wild animals larger than a goldskin fox in the woods for twice two hundred years, still such creatures seemed likelier than dragons. Dragons, they knew with absolute and necessary conviction, were no more.

It was a fisherman who saw Aredd and lived to tell of it. In a passion one early morning he had gone over the side of his boat to untangle a line. It was a fine line, spun out over the long winter by his wife, and he was not about to lose it, for the mark of its spinning was still on his wife’s forefinger and thumb. The line was down a great ways underwater and he had scarcely breath enough to work it free of a black root. But after three dives he had worked it loose and was surfacing again when he saw the bright water above him suddenly darken. He knew water too well to explain it, but held his breath longer and slowed his ascent until the darkness had passed by. Lucky it was, for when he broke through the foam, the giant body was gone past, its claws empty. All the fisherman saw clearly through water-filmed eyes was the great rudder of its red tail. He treaded water by his boat, too frightened to pull himself in, and a minute later the dragon went over him again, its claws full of the innkeeper’s prize bull, the one that had sired the finest calves in the countryside but was so fierce it had to be staked down day and night. The bull was still twitching and the blood fell from its back thicker than rain.

The fisherman slipped his hand from the boat and went under the water, both to cleanse himself of the blood and the fear. When he surfaced again, the dragon was gone. But the fisherman stayed in the water until the cold at last drove him out, his hands as wrinkled as his grandpap’s from their long soaking.

He swam to shore, forgetting both boat and line, and ran all the way back to the village leaving a wet trail. No one believed him until they saw the meadow from which the bull—chain and all—had been ripped. Then even the priest was convinced.

The healer’s wife and her three daughters wept anew when they were told. And Tansy, remembering the patch of dragon’s bane, blamed herself for not having guessed.

May-Ma raised her fist to the sky and screamed out the old curse on dragons, remembered from years of mummery played out at planting:

The priest tried to take the sting of her loss away. The cooper’s wife was inconsolable as well, surrounded by her eleven younglings. The village men sharpened their iron pitchforks and the old poisoned arrows that hung on the church’s small apse walls were heated until the venom dripped. Tansy had to treat three boys for the flux who had put their fingers on the arrows and then on their lips. The beekeeper got down an old book that had traveled through his family over the years called
Ye Draconis: An Historie Unnaturalis.
The only useful information therein was: “An fully fledged draconis will suppe and digeste an bullock in fourteen days.” They counted twelve days at best before the beast returned to feed again.

And then someone said, “We need a dragonslayer.”

So the fisherman’s son and the beekeeper’s son and three other boys were sent off to see who they could find, though, as the priest thundered from the pulpit, “Beware of false heroes. Without dragons there be no need of dragonslayers.”

As the boys left the village, their neighbors gathered to bid them godspeed. The sexton rang Great Tom, the treble bell that had been cast in the hundredth year after the victory over dragons. On its side was the inscription:
I am Tom, when I toll there is fire, when I thunder there is victory.
The boys carried the sound with them down the long, winding roads.

They found heroes aplenty in the towns they visited. There were men whose bravery extended to the rim of a wine cup but, sober the morning after, turned back into ploughboys, farmers, and laborers who sneaked home without a by-your-leave. They found one old general who remembered ancient wounds and would have followed them if he had had legs, but the man who carted him to and from town was too frightened to push the barrow after them. And they found a farmer’s strong daughter who could lift a grown ewe under each arm but whose father forbade her to go. “One girl and five boys together on the road?” he roared. “Would that be proper? After such a trip, no one would wed her.” So though she was a head taller than her da, and forty pounds heavier, she wanted a wedding, so she stayed.

It was in a tosspot inn that the five village boys found the one they sought. They knew him for a hero the moment he stood. He moved like a god, the golden hair rippling down his back. Muscles formed like small mountains on his arms and he could make them walk from shoulder to elbow without the slightest effort. He was of a clan of gentle giants but early on had had a longing to see the world.

It did not occur to any one of the five why a hero should have sunk so low as to be cadging drinks by showing off his arms. It was enough for them that they had found him.

“Be you a hero?” breathed the fisherman’s son, tracing the muscles with his eyes.

The blond man smiled, his teeth white and even. “Do I look like one?” he asked, answering question with question, making the muscles dance across his shoulders. “My name is Lancot.”

The beekeeper’s son looked dazzled. “That be a hero’s name,” he said with a sigh.

The boys shared their pennies and bought Lancot a mug of stew. He remembered things for them then: service to a foreign queen, a battle with a walking tree, three goblins spitted on his sword. (Their blood had so pitted the blade he left it on their common grave, which was why he had it not.) On and on through the night he spun out his tales and they doled out their coin in exchange. Each thought it a fair bargain.

In the morning they caught up with him several miles down the road, his pockets a-jangle with the coins they had paid for his tales—as well as the ones they thought they had gone to bed with. They begrudged him none of it. A hero is entitled.

“Come back with us, Lancot,” begged the beekeeper’s son, “and we can promise you a fine living.”

“More coins than ten pockets could hold,” added the fisherman’s son, knowing it for a small boast.

They neglected to mention the dragon, having learned that one small lesson along the way.

And the hero Lancot judged them capable of five pockets at best. Still, five was better than none, and a fine village living was better than no living at all. There was bound to be at least one pretty girl there. He was weary of the road, for the world had turned out to be no better than his home—and no worse. So he shook his head, knowing that would make his golden hair ripple all down his back. And he tensed his muscles once more for good measure. They deserved
something
for their coin.

“He is almost like … a god,” whispered one of the boys.