Dragonfield: And Other Stories Page 5

  My eldest sister seriously questioned this last accomplishment. “If you can never leave this land, why do you need more than one language?” she asked.

  I could not explain the simple love of learning to her, but Father hushed her. “After all,” he said, “when fifteen years are up …”

  “Give or take a month,” I added.

  “… Things may be very different around here.” He smiled but would say no more.

  On her fifteenth birthday, Talia summoned all the local fey to her party except me. I had been left off of every guest list since her christening. My sisters and brothers were jealous of that fact, but there was nothing they could do about it. Even fairies cannot change the past.

  Talia called her party a “Sleep-Over Ball” and announced that everyone was to come in nightclothes. Talia herself ordered a new gown for the occasion that resembled a peignoir, with a peek-a-boo Alençon lace and little pink ribbons sewn in strategic places. She was much ahead of her peers and had a positive genius for seduction. There was not a male member of the peerage who had escaped her spell and several fowlers and a stable boy were languishing for love of her. Even my oldest brother Dusty, who had rather common tastes, was smitten and planned to go to the party with a handful of crushed pennyroyal in each pocket, to keep the magic—as he put it—“close to the seat of his affection.”

  “Affliction,” I said.

  Dusty smiled and tousled my hair. He was smitten, but not without a sense of humor about it all.

  Father and Mother were allowed to beg off since this was to be a party for young folk.

  We three watched from the pavilion steps as the twelve flew into the moonlight, the wind feathering their wings. As they passed across the moon, like dust motes through light, I had a sudden fit of shivers. Father put his arm around me and Mother fetched me a shawl. They thought it was the cold, you see.

  But it was more than that. “The fifteenth year,” I whispered, “give or take a month.” My voice was thinned out by the night air.

  Father looked at Mother and they both looked at me. Whatever I had felt, whatever had made me shiver, suddenly communicated to them as well. Mother said not a word but went into the pavilion and emerged moments later with a hat and a long wool scarf for me, an Aran Island sweater for Father, and a muff for herself. She had bad circulation and flying always leaves her with cold hands.

  We closed our eyes and spoke the spell.

  Far frae earth and far frae barrows,

  Up to where the blue sky narrows,

  Wind and wildness, wings and weather,

  Allie-up together.

  Now!

  As I lifted into the air I could feel the beginnings of a magic headache coming on, and my shoulders started to hurt as well. I have always had weak wings, but they are adequate for simple travel. We landed at the palace only minutes behind my brothers and sisters, but we were already too late. The sleeping spell had begun.

  There was a cook asleep with her hand raised to strike the scullery and she, poor little wench, had been struck by sleep instead. It had happened at the moment of her only retaliation against the cook, which she got by kicking the cook’s cat. The cat, unaware of the approaching kick, was snoring with one paw wrapped around a half-dead sleeping mouse.

  Along the hall guards slept at their posts: one had been caught in the act of picking his teeth with his knife, one was peeling an orange with his sword, one was scraping his boot with his javelin tip, and one was picking his nose.

  The guests, dressed in nightgowns and nightshirts, snored and shivered and twitched but did not wake. And in the midst of them all, lying in state, was Talia, presents piled at her feet. She blew delicate little bubbles between her partially opened lips, and under her closed eyelids I could see the rapid scuttling of dreams.

  My brothers and sisters, immune to the spell, hovered above the scene nervously, except for Dusty who darted down to the bed every now and then to steal a kiss from the sleeping Talia. But, as he later admitted, she was so unresponsive, he soon wearied of the game.

  “I am not a necrophile, after all,” he said petulantly, which was a funny thing for him to say since right before Talia, he had been in love with the ghost of a suicide who haunted the road at Miller’s Cross.

  Mother put her fingers to her mouth and whistled them down.

  Father announced, “Time for a family conference.”

  We looked in every room in the castle, including the garde-robe, but there were sleepers in every one. So we met on the castle stairs.

  “Well, what now?” asked Mother.

  “It’s Gorse’s spell,” Dusty said, his mouth still wet from Talia’s bubbly kisses. He hovered, pouting, over the steps.

  “Of course it is Gorse’s spell,” said Father, “but that does not mean it is Gorse’s fault. Don’t be angry, Dusty. Just shake out your pockets and sit down.”

  Dusty did as he was told as Father’s voice was very firm and not to be argued with. As soon as the grains of pennyroyal had touched the ground, his mood lightened and he even sat next to me and held my hand.

  In fact, we all held hands, that being the best way to augment a family conference. It aids the thinking, it generates energy, and it keeps one’s hands warm as well.

  Mother looked up. “The knot,” she said. “We must remember the knot in the thread.”

  Father nodded. “The Laws of Correspondence and Balance …” he mused.

  And then I knew what to do, my reading in Logic having added texture to my spells. “There must be a similar knot about the palace,” I said. I let go of Dusty’s hand and stood, waving my hand widdershins. A great wind began to blow from the North. It picked up the pennyroyal, plucked seeds from the thorn, gathered wild rose pips and acorns and flung them into the air. Faster and faster the whirlwind blew, a great black tunnel of air.

  Blow and sow

  This fertile ground

  Until the knot

  Be all unwound,

  I sang. One by one everyone joined me, Dusty immediately, then my other brothers and sisters, and at the last Father and finally Mother. We spoke the spell a hundred times for the hundred years and, in the end, only Mother and I had the voice for it. My voice was husky and rasping but Mother’s was low and there was a longing in it compounded of equal parts of wind and sea, for the Shouting Fey came originally from the Cornish coast, great-great-great-grandfather being a sea sprite with a roving sailor’s eye.

  And then I dropped out of the spell with the worst headache imaginable and Mother ended it with a shout, the loudest I had ever heard her utter. It was so loud, the earth itself was shocked and opened up hundreds of tiny mouths in surprise. Into every one of those tiny mouths a seed or pip or nut popped and, in moments, they had begun to grow. We watched as years were compressed into seconds and green shoots leaped upward towards the sky. By the time the last echo of Mother’s shout had died away, a great forest of mammoth oak and thorny vines surrounded the palace. Only one small passage overhead remained open where the moon beamed down a narrow light. Inside the rest of the knotted wood it was as dark as a dream, as deep as sleep.

  “Come, children,” said Father.

  We rode the moonbeam up and out and, as the last of us passed through the hole, the thorns sewed themselves shut behind us over the deathly quiet. We neither spoke nor sang all the way home.

  Having read through the L’s in Father’s library, I turned my attention to the H’s, my choice dictated by the fact that the wall with those books has a window that overlooks the orchard. The gnarled old trees that manage to bring forth their sweet red gifts every year fill me with wonder. It is a magic no fey could ever duplicate. And so now I have a grounding in Hagiography, Harmonics, Hormones, and History. It has been a lucky choice.

  One of the books I read spoke about the rise of a religion called Democracy which believes in neither monarchs nor magic. It encourages the common man. When, in a hundred years, some young princeling manages to unravel the k
not of wood about Talia’s domain, I plan to be by his side, whispering the rote of Revolution in his ear. If my luck holds—and the Cloth of Invisibility works just long enough—Talia will seem to him only a musty relic of a bygone era whose bedclothes speak of decadence and whose bubbly breath of decay. He will wed the scullery out of compassion, and learn Computer Science. Then the spell of the land will be broken. No royal wedding—no royal babes. No babes—no inheritance. And though we fey will still be tied to the land, our wishes will belong to us alone.

  Father, Mother, my sisters, my brothers, sometimes freedom is won by a long patience, something that works far better than any magical spell.

  The Storyteller

  He unpacks his bag of tales

  with fingers quick

  as a weaver’s

  picking the weft threads,

  threading the warp.

  Watch his fingers.

  Watch his lips

  speaking the old familiar words:

  “Once there was

  and there was not,

  oh, best beloved,

  when the world was filled with wishes

  the way the sea is filled with fishes …”

  All those threads

  pulling us back

  to another world, another time,

  when goosegirls married well

  and frogs could rhyme,

  when maids spoke syllables of pearl

  and stepmothers came to grief.

  Belief is the warp

  and the sharp-picked pattern

  of motif

  reminds us that Araby

  is not so far;

  that the pleasure dome

  of a Baghdad caliph

  sits side by side

  with the rush-roofed home

  of a Tattercoat or an animal bride.

  Cinderella wears a shoe

  first fitted in the East

  where her prince—

  no more a beast

  than the usual run of royal son—

  measures her nobility

  by the lotus foot,

  so many inches to the reign.

  Then the slipper made glass

  by a slip of ear and tongue.

  All tales are mistakes

  made true by the telling.

  The watching eye takes in the hue,

  the listening ear the word,

  but all they comprehend is Art.

  A story must be worn again

  before the magic garment

  fits the ready heart.

  The storyteller is done.

  He packs his bag.

  But watch his fingers

  and his lips.

  It is the oldest feat

  of prestidigitation.

  What you saw,

  what you heard,

  was equal to a new Creation.

  The colors blur,

  time is now.

  He speaks his final piece

  before his final bow:

  “It is all true,

  it is not true.

  The more I tell you,

  The more I shall lie.

  What is story

  but jesting Pilate’s cry.

  I am not paid to tell you the truth.”

  The Five Points of Roguery

  THE LAND OF DUN D’ADDIN is known for its rogues, though how so many could have been crowded into so small and homey a place has never been explained. Dun D’Addin is really only one great hill, a land cast off from its neighbors by its height. Folks there live On-the-Hill, By-the-Hill, Over-the-Hill, and ones still on the run from the law live Under-the-Hill and it gives them all a rather lumpish disposition.

  There are no main streets, only rough paths most often laced over with vines: thornbush and prickleweed and the rough-toothed caught-ums. The trees tend to grow sideways away from the hill, dropping the wrinkled and bitter fruit into the borderlands.

  Dun D’Addin is a place meant to be passed over or passed through or passed by on the way to somewhere else and that is why there is only the one inn, atop the hill, called—perversely—the Bird and the Babe, though it has little to do with either. It is in that inn, before the great central hearth, that the Hill’s resident rogues gather and try to outwit one another with their boasting tales. They are rather pathetically proud of their reputation for roguery, but it is really only of the smash-and-grab variety. True finesse is, I am afraid, quite beyond them as they found out one evening in front of the fire at the Bird and the Babe, to their eternal chagrin and everlasting regret.

  “There was an old fiddling tune called Nine Points of Roguery in the land I came from,” said slip-fingered Jok. “But of course that’s absurd.”

  “Why?” asked the innkeeper. He knew his role in these discussions. He had a positive genius for keeping conversation, especially brag-tales, flowing. That genius consisted mainly of asking one word questions at the right time.

  “Why? Because I can only think of five,” said Jok. “And you have to agree that I am about as roguish a fellow as you are likely to meet in the highways and byways of Dun D’Addin.”

  The men at the hearth fire chuckled, each of them silently thinking himself the greater rogue. And besides, Dun D’Addin’s highways were crackled with grass and the byways ruts of mud both in and out of the rainy season.

  The innkeeper used his silence to bless Jok. Chuckling men are drinking men, was his thought. He made his money without roguery but by supplying vast quantities of ale to the listeners and supplying to travelers a few straw pallets and a thin blanket for the night.

  One florid fat man, a stranger and obviously a merchant by his garb, put up his finger. It was missing the top knuckle. The bottom two signed grotesquely at the innkeeper. “Drinks around,” said the merchant. “I want to hear about these five points of roguery, especially from the mouth of a rogue.”

  “Point one,” said Jok, smiling and then sipping on his ale, “is the eye.” He winked at them all and they gave him a laugh.

  “Eye?” asked the innkeeper, right in rhythm.

  “The eye,” said Jok. “It must be clear and bright and honest-seeming, and never a wink between you and your Pick.” Then he winked again, more broadly this time, and laughed with them.

  The listeners settled back in their chairs. The fat man grunted as fat men will, rooting around in his own chair like a pig in wallow, but at last he too was ready. Jok, staring at him openly, patiently, waited to begin.

  One: The Eye

  There was a man, a constant traveler and purveyor of goods not quite his own, if you take my meaning (said Jok), who through a great misfortune had been maimed in the war. But he turned this to his own profit, as you will see. A man who can do that could be king, though his kingdom be no more than a cherrystone and his people only ants.

  (Though his kingdom be no more than a muddy hill, said the fat man under his breath, and his people no more than rogues.)

  He had, in his travels, acquired a diamond the size of a knuckle and its original owner, the local high sheriff, was not pleased at its disappearance. The borders of the land were sealed and at every turning armed men were posted in pairs to search travelers—and one another—to find the precious jewel.

  In the course of their searchings, they had uncovered many a thief and villain, and the trees along the borderlands were festooned with bodies since thievery was rewarded with hanging in those times. It was a heavy harvest.

  But that did not worry our traveler. He boldly stepped up the line and had himself searched. He winked at one soldier with a steady eye and let them rip through the innocent seams of his coat. They even cored his apple and examined the pips. He thanked them for preparing his meal and waved as he walked through the orchard of ripe souls. He was careful not to run.

  And when he got to the other side of the dark wood, where Dun D’Addin’s hill began, he smiled. Then he popped out the staring false eye into h
is hand; the real one had been put out in the war. He winkled the diamond from his eyesocket and, whistling, went to sell the jewel at an eye-catching price to the Fence-Who-Lives-On-The-Hill.

  “Did he really?” asked the innkeeper, forced to use three words instead of one but still sure of the bargain.

  “I knew a man with a blind eye once, but never a socket that could glitter like that,” said a listener. “And I’ve lived in Dun D’Addin all my life, high on it, as they say.” He slapped his thigh. He was a storekeeper by trade and a gambler by inclination and thus poor at both.

  Jok smiled at the storekeeper, at the innkeeper, at the fat man awallow in the chair, and then at his newly filled glass, but did not answer. Instead he took a sip of his drink.

  “That was a bit of a joke rather than a pointer,” said the florid fat man. “I expected more.” He signed again with his mutilated hand.

  “Wounded in the war, sir?” asked Jok at last, staring at the hand without flinching.

  “No,” said the fat man. “Caught it in my uncle’s till when I was but a boy. I’ve learned a lot since.” He smiled. “But I’ve come up on the hill, to the home of prosperous thieves, to learn more. So—what is your second point of roguery?”

  Jok stared at the grotesque hand with the puckered knuckle in place of a nail. “Point two—the hand,” he said. “Fast and mobile and quicker than the eye.”

  “Quicker than a fake eye?” called out a listener, a miller who had given false weight and been driven out of his town before settling atop Dun D’Addin’s hill. They all chuckled, ready to listen again.

  Two: The Hand

  There was a surgeon’s apprentice (continued Jok) who lined his pockets with the buying and selling of body parts. Hanged murderers, suicides buried at crossroads, and the pickings after battle were his stock in trade. He did not traffic in the appendages of steady husbands and faithful wives, but had a rather brisk business along the border of Dun D’Addin with the sawn-off limbs of felons, miscreants, and malefactors.