Dragonfield (21 page)

In the quickening dark she floated down, feather-light and luminous at the clearing’s edge. Slowly she moved, eating and cooing and calling for her missing flock. She came in the end to where Hugh sat and began to feed at his feet.

He moved his hands once and the net was over her, then his hands were over her, too. The dove twisted and pecked but he held her close, palms upon wings, fingers on neck.

When the white dove saw she could not move, she turned her bright black eyes on the fowler and spoke to him in a cooing woman’s voice.

“Master fowler, set me free.

Gold and silver I’ll give thee.”

“Neither gold nor silver tempt me,” said Hugh.
“Servo
is my motto. I serve my master. And my master is the king.”

Then the white dove spoke again:

“Master fowler, set me free,

Fame and fortune follow thee.”

But the fowler shook his head and held on tight. “After the king, I serve the forest,” he said. “Fame and fortune are not masters here.” He rose with the white dove in his hands and made ready to return to his house.

Then the bird shook itself all over and spoke for a third time. Its voice was low and beguiling:

“Master fowler, free this dove,

The queen will be your own true love.”

For the first time, then, though night was almost on them, the fowler noticed the golden ring that glittered and shone on the dove’s foot. As if in a vision, he saw the Lady Columba again, slim and neat and fair. He heard her voice and felt her hand in his.

He began to tremble and his heart began to pulse madly. He felt a burning in his chest and limbs. Then he looked down at the dove and it seemed to be smiling at him, its black eyes glittering.

“Servo”
he cried out, his voice shaking.
“Servo.”
He closed his eyes and twisted the dove’s neck. Then he touched the motto on his tunic. He could feel the word
Servo
impress itself coldly on his fingertips. One quick rip and the motto was torn from his breast. He flung it to the meadow floor, put the limp dove in his pouch, and went through the forest to his home.

The next day the fowler brought the hundred doves—the ninety-nine live ones and the one dead—to the king’s kitchen. But there never was a wedding.

The fowler gave up hunting and lived on berries and fruit the rest of his life. Every day he made his way to the clearing to throw out grain for the birds. Around his neck, from a chain, a gold ring glittered. And occasionally he would touch the spot on his tunic, above his heart, which was shredded and torn.

But though songbirds and sparrows ate his grain, and swallows came at his calling, he never saw another dove.

“Wheresoever love goes, the lover follows.”

O
NCE IN A HOUSE
overlooking the cold northern sea a baby was born. She was so plain, her father, a sea captain, remarked on it.

“She shall be a burden,” he said. “She shall be on our hands forever.” Then without another glance at the child he sailed off on his great ship.

His wife, who had longed to please him, was so hurt by his complaint that she soon died of it. Between one voyage and the next, she was gone.

When the captain came home and found this out, he was so enraged, he never spoke of his wife again. In this way he convinced himself that her loss was nothing.

But the girl lived and grew as if to spite her father. She looked little like her dead mother but instead had the captain’s face set round with mouse-brown curls. Yet as plain as her face was, her heart was not. She loved her father but was not loved in return.

And still the captain remarked on her looks. He said at every meeting, “God must have wanted me cursed to give me such a child. No one will have her. She shall never be wed. She shall be with me forever.” So he called her Borne, for she was his burden.

Borne grew into a lady and only once gave a sign of this hurt.

“Father,” she said one day when he was newly returned from the sea, “what can I do to heal this wound between us?”

He looked away from her, for he could not bear to see his own face mocked in hers, and spoke to the cold stone floor. “There is nothing between us, daughter,” he said. “But if there were, I would say
Salt for such wounds.”

“Salt?” Borne asked.

“A sailor’s balm,” he said. “The salt of tears or the salt of sweat or the final salt of the sea.” Then he turned from her and was gone next day to the farthest port he knew of, and in this way he cleansed his heart.

After this, Borne never spoke of it again. Instead, she carried it silently like a dagger inside. For the salt of tears did not salve her, and so she turned instead to work. She baked bread in her ovens for the poor, she nursed the sick, she held the hands of the sea widows. But always, late in the evening, she walked on the shore looking and longing for a sight of her father’s sail. Only less and less often did he return from the sea.

One evening, tired from the work of the day, Borne felt faint as she walked on the strand. Finding a rock half in half out of the water, she climbed upon it to rest. She spread her skirts about her, and in the dusk they lay like great gray waves.

How long she sat there, still as the rock, she did not know. But a strange pale moon came up. And as it rose, so too rose the little creatures of the deep. They leaped free for a moment of the pull of the tide. And last of all, up from the deeps, came the merman.

He rose out of the crest of the wave, seafoam crowning his green-black hair. His hands were raised high above him, and the webbings of his fingers were as colorless as air. In the moonlight he seemed to stand upon his tail. Then, with a flick of it, he was gone, gone back to the deeps. He thought no one had remarked his dive.

But Borne had. So silent and still, she saw it all, his beauty and his power. She saw him and loved him, though she loved the fish half of him more. It was all she could dare.

She could not tell what she felt to a soul, for she had no one who cared. Instead she forsook her work and walked by the sea both morning and night. Yet, strange to say, she never once looked for her father’s sail.

That is why one day her father returned without her knowing. He watched her pacing the shore for a long while through slotted eyes, for he would not look straight upon her. At last he said, “Be done with it. Whatever ails you, give it over.” For even he could see this wound.

Borne looked up at him, her eyes shimmering with small seas. Grateful for his attention, she answered, “Yes, Father, you are right. I must be done with it.”

The captain turned and left her then, for his food was cold. But Borne went directly to the place where the waves were creeping onto the shore. She called out in a low voice, “Come up. Come up and be my love.”

There was no answer except the shrieking laughter of the birds as they dived into the sea.

So she took a stick and wrote the same words upon the sand for the merman to see should he ever return. Only, as she watched, the creeping tide erased her words one by one. Soon there was nothing left of her cry on that shining strand.

So Borne sat herself down on the rock to cry. And each tear was an ocean.

But the words were not lost. Each syllable washed from the beach was carried below, down, down, down to the deeps of the cool, inviting sea. And there, below on his coral bed, the merman saw her call and came.

He was all day swimming up to her. He was half the night seeking that particular strand. But when he came, cresting the currents, he surfaced with a mighty splash below Borne’s rock.

The moon shone down on the two, she a grave shadow perched upon a stone and he all motion and light.

Borne reached down with her white hands and he caught them in his. It was the only touch she could remember. She smiled to see the webs stretched taut between his fingers. He laughed to see hers webless, thin, and small. One great pull between them and he was up by her side. Even in the dark she could see his eyes on her under the phosphoresence of his hair.

He sat all night by her. And Borne loved the man of him as well as the fish, then, for in the silent night it was all one.

Then, before the sun could rise, she dropped his hands on his chest. “Can you love me?” she dared to ask at last.

But the merman had no tongue to tell her above the waves. He could only speak below the water with his hands, a soft murmuration. So, wordlessly, he stared into her eyes and pointed to the sea.

Then, with the sun just rising beyond the rim of the world, he turned, dived arrow slim into a wave, and was gone.

Gathering her skirts, now heavy with ocean spray and tears, Borne stood up. She cast but one glance at the shore and her father’s house beyond. Then she dived after the merman into the sea.

The sea put bubble jewels in her hair and spread her skirts about her like a scallop shell. Tiny colored fish swam in between her fingers. The water cast her face in silver, and all the sea was reflected in her eyes.

She was beautiful for the first time. And for the last.

Linz, Austria, 1898

T
HE BOY COULD NOT
sleep. It was hot and he had been sick for so long. All night his head had throbbed. Finally he sat up and managed to get out of bed. He went down the stairs without stumbling.

Elated at his progress, he slipped from the house without waking either his mother or father. His goal was the river bank. He had not been there in a month.

He had always considered the river bank his own. No one else in the family ever went there. He liked to set his feet in the damp ground and make patterns. It was like a picture, and the artist in him appreciated the primitive beauty.

Heat lightning jetted across the sky. He sat down on a fallen log and picked at the bark as he would a scab. He could feel the log imprint itself on his backside through the thin cotton pajamas. He wished—not for the first time—that he could be allowed to sleep without his clothes.

The silence and heat enveloped him. He closed his eyes and dreamed of sleep, but his head still throbbed. He had never been out at night by himself before. The slight touch of fear was both pleasure and pain.

He thought about that fear, probing it like a loose tooth, now to feel the ache and now to feel the sweetness, when the faint came upon him and he tumbled slowly from the log. There was nothing but river bank before him, nothing to slow his descent, and he rolled down the slight hill and into the river, not waking till the shock of the water hit him.

It was cold and unpleasantly muddy. He thrashed about. The sour water got in his mouth and made him gag.

Suddenly someone took his arm and pulled him up onto the bank, dragged him up the slight incline.

He opened his eyes and shook his head to get the lank, wet hair from his face. He was surprised to find that his rescuer was a girl, about his size, in a white cotton shift. She was not muddied at all from her efforts. His one thought before she heaved him over the top of the bank and helped him back onto the log was that she must be quite marvelously strong.

“Thank you,” he said, when he was seated again, and then did not know where to go from there.

“You are welcome.” Her voice was low, her speech precise, almost old-fashioned in its carefulness. He realized that she was not a girl but a small woman.

“You fell in,” she said.

“Yes.”

She sat down beside him and looked into his eyes, smiling. He wondered how he could see so well when the moon was behind her. She seemed to light up from within like some kind of lamp. Her outline was a golden glow and her blond hair fell in straight lengths to her shoulder.

“You may call me Angelica,” she said.

“Is that your name?”

She laughed. “No. No, it is not. And how perceptive of you to guess.”

“Is it an alias?” He knew about such things. His father was a customs official and told the family stories at the table about his work.

“It is the name I …” she hesitated for a moment and looked behind her. Then she turned and laughed again. “It is the name I travel under.”

“Oh.”

“You could not pronounce my real name,” she said.

“Could I try?”

“Pistias Sophia!”
said the woman and she stood as she named her self. She seemed to shimmer and grow at her own words, but the boy thought that might be the fever in his head, though he hadn’t a headache anymore.

“Pissta …” he could not stumble around the name. There seemed to be something blocking his tongue. “I guess I better call you Angelica for now,” he said.

“For now,” she agreed.

He smiled shyly at her. “My name is Addie,” he said.

“I know.”

“How do you know? Do I look like an Addie? It means…”

“Noble hero,” she finished for him.

“How do you know
that?”

“I am very wise,” she said. “And names are important to me. To all of us. Destiny is in names.” She smiled, but her smile was not so pleasant any longer. She started to reach for his hand, but he drew back.

“You shouldn’t boast,” he said. “About being wise. It’s not nice.”

“I am not boasting.” She found his hand and held it in hers. Her touch was cool and infinitely soothing. She reached over with the other hand and put it first palm, then back to his forehead. She made a “tch” against her teeth and scowled. “Your guardian should be Flung Over. I shall have to speak to Uriel about this. Letting you out with such a fever.”

“Nobody
let
me out,” said the boy. “I let myself out. No one knows I am here—except you.”

“Well, there is one who
should
know where you are. And he shall certainly hear from me about this.” She stood up and was suddenly much taller than the boy. “Come. Back to the house with you. You should be in bed.” She reached down the front of her white shift and brought up a silver bottle on a chain. “You must take a sip of this now. It will help you sleep.”

“Will you come back with me?” the boy asked after taking a drink.

“Just a little way.” She held his hand as they went.