The Dragon Queen (13 page)

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid for Mother. I cannot remember when she has not been near me. I remember her better than my human mother, and her teat in my mouth with its warm flow was my first comfort.”

“You have led a strange life for a woman, but I cannot think it has done you any harm,” Kyra said. “And, yes, I would rather offer you the comfort of kindly lies, but I know you would see through them. I believe you are very right to be afraid for Mother. She is old, after the fashion of wolves, and I have no recipes for healing her. I wish I could do more, but perhaps she is the best judge of her state, and she will be better in the morning.” Then she kissed me on the forehead and went to bed.

I finished eating, lay down beside Mother, and closed my eyes. The next memory I have is of white roses, the smell of them and the feel of petals with my fingers. I was walking among bushes filled with them. Each plant had long, trailing canes that rose from the top and fell away toward the ground; and each long branch was covered with white roses, pale without any trace of color, not even at the heart. The stamens and pistils were as white as the petals.

The air around me was thick with mist, and I could see no more than a few feet in any direction.
These are the roses of fairy tales, and this is no dream,
I thought. And when I looked down at my feet treading the white petals into dewy emerald grass, I knew it was no dream. And then a mound twined with white roses was before me and an opening that was a door to darkness.

I knew there was danger should I meet anyone, but I entered and found myself in a forest at night. I remembered Maeniel telling me about it, about trees, giants so wide the arms of many men outstretched could not span them and so tall they seemed to have caught the stars like flowers in their branches. It was a pathless forest, floored with ferns, and they were soft under my feet. I walked toward a waterfall that fell from a cliff even higher than the trees. In the darkness the water was silvered, glowing as though illuminated from within. It fell foaming into a basin, where it sparkled with a glow that reminded me of the star blaze of the sky on a mountain night, where the eye looks into diffuse clouds of distant light.

I came close to the basin and looked into the light that was sparkling, dancing, foaming, leaping in endless, ever changing patterns, flowing into a lower basin, then into a stream, where it lost itself among the trees. Abruptly, I was back in our home, and Mother was no longer beside me. I lifted my head and saw she was standing in the door.

“I came to say good bye.”

“No, Mother,” I said as I sat up. “No.”

“I don’t fear death,” she said. “None of us do. It is God’s gift to us. We don’t really ever even think about it. Not the way you do. I look forward to plunging into the stream, being carried on by the rapids out toward the shore and into the weir of stars of the eternal sea.”

Then I found myself back in the forest at the pool of light with Mother. She looked up at me. “I will always come when you need me,” she said. “As long as life lasts.”

She lowered her muzzle to the pool of stars, drank, and vanished.

I found myself back in our home. I still held her, but she was cold in my arms.

We made a pyre for her on a headland, one of those empty ones made only of windswept rock. Not everyone receives a pyre. Some are abandoned to the birds and the sea eagles, who clean the bones that they may be burned or returned to the houses to be kept and buried near the sleeping places. There are many different stories. The Christians say they must be buried to lie in the ground so they can find all their parts on the last day. Dugald was somewhat of this opinion. But Kyra, Maeniel, Black Leg, and I believed in doing it the old way, setting the spirit free to wander the stars and look for a new home. Besides, Maeniel pointed out, Mother was a wolf and maybe she didn’t want to go to a place where there were humans. I could understand that—we humans have a bad history with each other and a worse one with animals.

Others want to bring the bones back so that the spirits can guard the hearth and return to a woman’s womb, so they won’t go somewhere strange and join another family but be with their own people. And, considering the way some children become small copies of their parents, I can believe this works. Empirically speaking, of course. This is what Maeniel calls such conclusions—empirical—or as derived from observation. Wolf or not, I can believe he has a better education than Dugald. But we must do honor to Mother’s spirit and to her accomplishment—me! Because Maeniel, Black Leg, and Dugald all believe I would have died had not Mother been willing to give me her milk and for no short time. A wolf pup would have been far less of a trial.

Black Leg came in as we were making the body ready for the pyre. I wrapped Mother in a clean, undyed linen cloth and scented the bundle with juniper, cedar, and rose. Black Leg was wearing pants and carried a roe deer over his shoulder, and he said to the rest of us, “I am now a man. I remained in the other shape for her comfort and ease, but she told me I would be free to choose my state when she died.”

Maeniel went over and kissed him on the forehead. They smiled at one another. Kyra wept. Then she kissed Black Leg, and so did I. He looked at me strangely when I did. Maeniel frowned, then put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “She’s your sister,” he said.

“I know,” Black Leg answered, but his look was still intense.

Dugald threw up his hands. “I cannot believe this,” he said.

“I can,” Kyra told him. “Shut up. Don’t give either one of them ideas.”

Both Black Leg and I felt something for each other, but at that point we weren’t sure about it. He was younger than I was by some two years. He was not yet a man. Kyra fixed an old shirt of Maeniel’s for him, taking it in in places so he could wear it.

There is a lot to a funeral. First, we must each bathe. Since it was almost winter, we put up the bathhouse. It’s a sort of shed where you build a fire and heat rocks. People bathe two different ways. One is to throw water on the heated rocks and sit in the steam, the other is to put the hot rocks into a basin full of water to heat the water, and scrub yourself with nettle soap. I like to just sit in the steam, but Kyra made me bathe with water. Then she turned me around and washed my back.

“He loves you,” she said. “You don’t know it and I’m not sure he does either.”

“He’s my brother,” I said.

“No, he’s not,” she answered. “He is the son of a wolf and a half human.”

“I could do worse,” I said. “Since we met Maeniel, we have never gone hungry.”

“Yes, we are as prosperous as many who live on fine, strong farms,” she agreed. “That fool Dugald keeps talking about you as royalty and says you are destined for a king.”

“I have heard of kings,” I told her. “I have read of kings, but I have never seen one, and I have begun to think Dugald is touched in the head. Why would a king marry me? The merchant’s son aboard the boat seemed to believe I should consider myself lucky to be offered a nice present for lying with him.”

Kyra slapped my shoulder a little harder than she had to—just to get my attention. “I’m finished here,” she said, then handed me the bucket and dipper. “Rinse yourself off. What do you know of men lying with women?”

I shrugged, rinsed, and began to towel myself dry. “Last summer Black Leg and I invented a fine game. You know how couples sneak away to be by themselves in the rocks, the woods, or even the hayricks? Well, we would creep up on them and yell.”

“Merciful God,” Kyra said. “It’s a miracle you weren’t killed. Some of those men—”

“The women weren’t sweet about it, either,” I said. “Once or twice they got me with a rock. Remember when I told you I fell?”

“Heavens,” Kyra said.

I shrugged. “I’m nearly as fast as Black Leg. She was just lucky.”

“Lucky? A finger long cut over your ear,” Kyra snapped. “I
thought
you were lying at the time. You are nearly as quick and well balanced as the wolves and you never fall. Nice to know I was right.”

I shrugged again. I was settling my loincloth and reaching for my
strophium
to bind up my breasts. “At any rate, I know what the procedure is. Both Black Leg and I know how to do it. Do I have to wear this?”

“Yes’s‘s’s.” It was a hiss. “Absolutely. Now—and never go out without it again. You and that hellion brother of yours are much closer to being grown than I thought.”

Kyra went out and brought back a beautiful white blouse and another new pair of deerskin britches. I put on the garnet and amber necklace and combed out my hair. Kyra pushed me back to arm’s length and looked at me. Her one eye was sad and her expression somber.

“You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. And not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts.”

I laughed. “I am a dowerless girl. Dugald says I bear a great name, but who marries a name? Kyra, don’t be foolish.”

Then I kissed her, and we went to do our sad duty. We had built the pyre of cedar, ash, and oak. Since she had been more than wolf, we resolved to send Mother’s soul into the wind at twilight. We waited until the sun was on the western horizon.

Maeniel covered Mother’s head, and I kissed her between the ears on the top of her head, the way I always did. Black Leg, in buckskins, kissed her the same way. We must have been a strange sight on the lonely headland. The sea below crashed and thundered as the tide began to go out. The wind was a high, shrill keening, and we stood together, the four of us, after I placed Mother’s mortal shell on the pyre. We held hands and said goodbye.

Dugald
didn’t
make his usual weak remarks about heathens. We soaked some hanks of wool in oil and wine, pushed them among the logs, then we kindled a small fire and tried to light the pyre. She made a small bundle on top of the big pile of wood where we had curled her nose to tail as she usually slept. But try as we might, we couldn’t get the wood to burn. The sun slipped below the horizon, its glow kicking long legs out over the water. With the approaching darkness, the wind picked up and began to flail us with spray from the surf.

And then I understood.

I’m not sure how I understand these things. Dugald has all sorts of explanations, but they raise more questions than they answer for me. I simply knew. I walked out on the headland and put my hand on Mother’s body, a cold lump under the linen.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll call if I need you. Go! Find your peace.”

The fire leaped from my hand to the wood, as it had the day on the beach when the cold almost killed Gray Watcher and me. The fire burned far more brightly and fiercely than the amount of oil and wine we had included among the wood could explain. White hot, the flames roared through the logs until the heat drove us back far from the headland. The flames consumed the she wolf and blazed with fierce intensity as the roaring, exploding sheets of fire took my mother’s soul to the stars.

There is magic. the few things I had learned were really only tricks. I found out when I encountered the real thing. We questioned Cymry again at the turning of the year. As always, I asked if we would face raids that year. He said yes, but then would say no more. Kyra, as usual, tormented and threatened him. He wept and begged for more wine, oil, and meat. So I gave it to him, but either he didn’t know or wouldn’t tell us anything more. My own feeling was that he didn’t know. The world is a complex place, and any other world would be, also.

Winter was upon us, and it would be a hard one. The rain and cold in the late summer had killed the wheat crop and a lot of the barley. Rye and oats were all that was left. I went out with the other women to collect acorns and hazelnuts, and we got quite a few baskets of those. The meal would be ground and added to flour for bread.

I was working with the other women when the Gray Watcher came to call me. We had spread the hazelnuts and acorns out on the threshing floor. We were drying them. Put them away wet and they become moldy. The old people, the first people, lived on them. One way to make sure you had plenty of food was to allow both oak and hazel trees to become widespread, so they broadcast the seed in any area where it looked as though it would grow well. We had no problem in collecting a lot of both. Storage and processing were the difficulty.

This was the reason the chief was important. That’s a leap. Maeniel called it a route to power. He served the community by maintaining an area of dry storage under his house and by defending a large amount of common land where stock could be grazed by each family. He saw to the forest also, where our pigs foraged. They got most of the available hazelnuts and acorns on level ground. So I and the rest of the women had been climbing around the rocks for several weeks, collecting the surplus. It reposed in big baskets on the threshing floor. They had to be turned every day to ensure they were dry before they were placed in the basement of the chief’s house.

One thing knocks against another, like a wave brought into being by an offshore storm that ends by crashing into a beach a dozen miles away in the sunshine. If the wheat and barley crops both failed, we would not have enough food to over winter the stock, the sheep and cattle that provided both milk and meat for the summer. Yes, we could collect acorns and hazelnuts as we had, but if we took too many of them from the forest, then the pigs would not do well, and they are a staple in winter. But we women could collect acorns and nuts from the rocks where the pigs can’t forage, and the men could fish and bring in cod from the deep, cold water off the coast.

Neither task is easy. Both are arduous and can be very dangerous. Issa was in bed with a badly twisted ankle. All the more dangerous because she was due to deliver her second child in a few weeks. The rest of us were weary from toiling over the water soaked nuts. The ones collected from the rocks were apt to be more tainted by damp than the ones in the forest.

The men who must fish had to take out the old pirate boat, since it was the only one we owned that could be trusted in deep water. It took ten men to row it—at least ten men—and they would be hard put to control her. Maeniel was among the crew. The chief wouldn’t risk more than twelve men on her, because we all knew that, should she go down in a storm, the icy water would claim her crew in a few minutes. Only a little over a hundred people lived in our hamlet. Twelve men would be a disastrous loss, and twelve young men at that. The grieving would never be done. The loss of so many sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers might destroy us. The women might leave, never to return.