Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

She Still Loves the Dragon

She still loves thedragon that set her on fire.

The knight-errantwho came seeking you prepared so carefully. She made herself whole for you. To be worthy of you. To be strong enough to reach you, where you live, so very high.

She found the old wounds of her earlier errantry and of her past errors, and the other ones that had been inflicted through no fault of her own. She found the broken bones that had healed only halfway, and caused them to be refractured, and endured the pain so they would heal swift and straight, because dragons do not live in the low country where the earth is soft and walking is easy.

She sought out the sweet balms and even more so she sought out the herbs bitter as unwelcome truth, that must nevertheless be swallowed. She paid for both in time, and grief, and in skinned palms and pricked fingers.

She quested, and she crafted potions: to make her sight bright in the darkness; to make her hands strong on the stone.

The knight-errant,when she decides for the first time to seek the dragon, has with her many retainers, loyalty earned and nurtured through heroism and care. She has an entourage, pavilions, a warhorse, and a mare. She has armaments and shields for combat mounted and afoot.

They cannot climb with her.

She leaves them all among the soft grass and the gentle foothills below. She tells them not to wait for her.

She tells them to go home.

She climbedyour mountain for you. She was afraid, and it was high.

The winter lashed there. The strong sun scorched her. She ducked the landslide of snow and boulders the flip of your wings dislodged, when you resettled them in your sleep. She smelled the sulfur fumes emerging from long vents, and watched the pale blue flames burn here and there, eerie among the barren rust-black stone.

She drank melted snow; she tried to step around the ochre and yellow and burnt umber ruffles of the lichens, knowing they were fragile and ancient, the only other life tenacious enough to make its home in this place of fire and stone and snow.

The knight-errantsings a song to herself as she climbs, to keep up her courage. It is an old song now, a ballad with parts that can be traded between two people, and it goes with a fairytale, but it was a new song when she sang it then.

This is the song she is singing as the basalt opens her palms:

She is still singing as she achieves the hollow top of the mountain where the dragon nests, glaciers gently sublimating into steam against its belly. No one would bother to try to sneak up on a dragon. It doesn’t matter, however, as she is struck silent by the sight that greets her even as she comes to the end of her song.

How does a dragon seem?

Well, here is a charred coil like a curved trunk that has smoldered and cracked in a slow fire. And there is a flank as rugged as a scree slope, broken facets slick with anthracite rainbows. And there is a wing membrane like a veil of paper-ash, like the grey cuticle and veins of an enormous leaf when some hungry larva has gnawed everything that was living away. And over there is a stained horn or claw or tooth, deeply grooved, blunted by wear, perhaps ragged at the tip and stained ombre amber-grey with time and exercise and contact with what substances even the gods may guess at.

And here is an eye.

An eye, lit from within, flickering, hourglass-pupiled, mottled in carnelian shades.

An eye that as one regards it, is in its turn regarding one as well.

She tookoff her armor for you. She set it aside, piece by piece, even knowing what you are.

So that you could see her naked.

She showed you her scars and her treasures.

She stretched out her arms to the frost and her tender flesh prickled. Her breath plumed. She shook with the cold, unless it was fear that rattled her dark feet on the ice.

“Did youcome to destroy me?”

The dragon’s voice is not what she expected. It is soft and sweet, spring breezes, apple blossom, drifting petals all around. Ineluctably feminine. Everything the knight is not, herself.

The dragon sounds neither wary nor angry. Mildly curious, perhaps.

Intrigued.

The woman shakes so hard in the cold that she feels her own bones pulling against, straining her tendons.

“I came because you are the only challenge left to me,” the woman says. “I have crossed the ocean, yes, and sounded it too. I have braved deserts and jungles and caverns and the cold of the North. I have cooked my dinner in a geyser, and I have scaled mountains, too.” Here, she taps her bare heel ruefully on icy basalt. Her toes turn the color of dusk. They ache down to the bone.

She will put her boots back on soon enough, she decides. But she still has something to prove.

She says (and she only sounds, she thinks, the smallest amount as if she is boasting, and anyway all of it is true), “I have won wars, and I have prevented them from ever beginning. I have raised a daughter and sewn a shroud for a lover. I have written a song or two in my time and some were even sung by other people. I have lost at tables to the King of the Giants and still walked out of his hall alive. I even kissed that trickster once, the one you know, who turns themself into a mare and what-not, and came away with my lips still on.”

Maybe now she sounds a little like she is boasting. And anyway, still all of it is true.

And maybe even the dragon looks a little impressed.

“And now you’re naked in front of a dragon,” the dragon says, amused.

“That’s how it goes.” She wraps her arms around herself. Her words are more chatter than breath.

“Am I another item on your list?” the dragon asks. “Will you tick me off on your fingers when you climb back down?”

She looks at the dragon. An awful tenderness rises in her.

“No,” she says. “I do not think I will.”

“Come closer,” says the dragon. “It is warmer over here.”