Dragon Heart Read online

  The stern lurched up, and Tirza fell overboard. She plunged deep into the water; in her ears the constant roaring faded to a muted hum. She came up a few yards from the blazing bow of the galley, the glare in her eyes, the heat beating on her face. The sea was steaming. In the wild thrashing waves she could not swim; she could barely keep herself afloat. She flailed out with her arms, trying to claw her way through the broken battering waves. Something struck her in the side and drove her under. She swam up, and her outstretched arm caught something solid and she clung to it and pulled herself up to the air. A moment later she realized she was clutching a dead body.

  Even recoiling from it, she looked to see if it was Jeon. Then from just above her the huge red head drove down and took the corpse away, so close she saw her reflection in the fierce slits of its eyes.

  She screamed, clawing backward. The beast loomed over her, enormous, its red scales streaming. She saw its head dart down beyond her again and rear up, a man clutched in its jaws. The sailor was alive, thrashing, his mouth open, and the dragon flipped him up into the air, so that he came down headfirst, and swallowed him whole. The huge maw swung around again. Away from her. She struggled in the furious water, trying to swim across the tow, but the crashing directionless waves carried her swiftly always closer to the dragon. Her ears were full of roaring and screaming. She could not breathe; salt water stung her nose. She saw the wedge-shaped red head rise again, another man in its teeth.

  Then the surge of the water brought her directly against the dragon’s side. Her fingers scraped over the slick red scales, trying to find a hold. Above her, along the beast’s spine, rose a row of giant golden barbs, and she lunged up and caught one and held on.

  The beast was snapping at some other swimmer. Clutching the spine, Tirza was borne higher up into the air. Below her she saw the bow of the ship but not the stern. Nothing of her brother. Below her, the water was full of men, some drowned, some screaming and waving their arms, and some trying to swim, and the dragon caught another, and another, its head darting here and there at the end of its long, supple neck. She wrapped her belt around the spinal barb, to stay on, the barb thick as a tree bough, polished smooth and sleek as gold; she was sick to her stomach; she could not breathe; she knew that Jeon was dead, that they were all dead. She would die next. The beast whirled and her head struck the barb hard enough to daze her. The sky reeled by her, and then abruptly the dragon was plunging down again into the sea.

  She flung her head back, startled alert, and fought to untie her belt. The wet knot was solid. Just as the sea closed over her head she managed to draw in a deep lungful of air.

  The sea rushed past her. The light faded. They were going down, steadily down. She looked up, and far over her head she saw a body floating limp in the shrinking patch of pale water. Then the dragon was swimming sideways, and the water was rushing in one direction like a river, through some deep, cold place.

  The light vanished. In the pitch-darkness, surging along on the dragon’s back, she could not imagine an end. She had to breathe. Her lungs hurt. The dark water rippled on her skin. Her arms were wrapped around the barb, her body flying along above the strong-swimming beast. She counted to herself. Surely something would happen. When she got to ten she counted again. Her lungs ached. She could see nothing. Strange lights burst in her eyes and were gone. Nausea rose in her throat. Then the dragon was swimming upward and above them was sunlit water.

  She counted again, and at eight she burst into the light and the air.

  Her whole body shuddered, taking in great gulps of breath. She clung to the barb, looking around her. They were in a lake, or a lagoon, surrounded by high cliffs, the water salt but calm. She realized she was inside the headland, that some passage beneath the sea cliff connected this lagoon to the sea. Ahead of her the golden barbs ran up the huge coiled neck of the dragon; it was swimming toward the beach, a strip of sand at the foot of a pleated black cliff.

  She tore at her belt; with a leap of relief she saw the cloth had frayed almost apart in the wild ride, and with her fingers she ripped away the last fibers just as the dragon reached the shallow water. She plunged down the red-scaled side and ran up onto the sand.

  The black cliff there rose impossibly high and steep. But its sheer face was runneled and creased, and she ducked into the nearest of these seams, back into a narrow darkening gorge that bent sharply to the left and then pinched into nothing, a cage of rock.

  Far enough, she thought. She was only a few feet from the beach, but the opening was narrow and the beast couldn’t reach her here, and the bend might shelter her from the flames. She crept cautiously up nearer the opening and peered around the corner, to see out.

  The dragon had lain down right in front of her on the sand, its great head only about ten feet away. So it knew she was there. But it stretched out, relaxed, well fed, half-asleep. She leaned against the rock wall behind her and looked it over.

  At ease, the beast sprawled with its neck coiled, its head between its forepaws, arched claws outstretched, each claw as long as she was. The massive bulk of its body curled away, its tail half in the water still. The red arrow-shaped head lay half-turned toward her, the eyes closed. A glistening horn thrust up above each of its eyes, which were rimmed in gold, the wide, curled, oddly delicate nostrils also gold trimmed. The long red neck led back between the high, round ridge of shoulders with scales a yard across. Each scale was glossy red, gold edged, at the center a black boss. Below its barbed spine the scales overlapped in even horizontal rows, smaller with each row, red squares in golden outline. As they shrank, the black boss at the middle became smaller and fainter, the gold trim thinner; until the scales low on its sides were red alone.

  She watched the dragon until the daylight was gone. Once, in its sleep, its jaws parted and gave a soft greenish burp and a little round stone rolled out. Still sleeping, its red tongue licked over its lips and it settled deeper on the sand.

  The sun went down. In the night, she thought, she could escape and she edged closer to the beach. Just as she reached the mouth of the crevice the dragon’s near eye opened, shining in the dark, fixed on her. Tirza scuttled back into the deep of the crevice, all her hair on end. She thought she heard a low growl behind her.

  She wept; she wept for Jeon and even for the Imperial men, and for herself, because she knew she was lost. At last she slept a little. When she woke, it was morning and she was so hungry and thirsty that she went back to the mouth of the crevice.

  The dragon was still there. It stood on its short, heavy legs, looking away from her. The sun blazed on its splendor, the glowing red scales, the curved golden barbs along its spine. Then the narrow-jawed head swung toward her, high above her on the long neck. Between its wide-set eyes was a disk of gold. Its eyes were big as washtubs, the black pupil a long vertical slice through the red silk of the iris, the haw at the inner corner like a fold of gold lace.

  It gave a low roar, and the roar resolved into a voice so deep and huge she imagined she heard it not through her ears but the bones of her head. “Why don’t you come out where I can eat you?”

  “Please don’t eat me,” she said.

  His eyes widened, looking startled. Her mouth fell open. He understood her. For a moment, they stared at each other. She took a step toward him.

  “Why shouldn’t I? You’ll just die in there anyway.” He gave a cold chuckle. “And by then you’d be too thin to bother digging for. Tell me what you’ll give me, if I don’t eat you.”

  She stood at the mouth of the crevice, and all the words crowded through her mind, everything she had ever said that nobody else had understood. But all she said was, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Can you dance? Sing?”

  “I—”

  The dragon said, “Tell me a story.”

  A cold tingle went down her back. “A story,” she said.

  “If it’s good enough, I won’t eat you.” The dragon settled himself down, curling his forelimbs under
him like a cat, waiting.

  Her heart thumped. She sifted quickly through all the stories she had ever heard; she knew at once that those stories of men would not satisfy the dragon, much less save her life.

  He was waiting, patient, his jeweled eyes on her. She realized since he had begun speaking to her she had thought of him as “he.” That gave her a wisp of an idea. She sat down in the mouth of the cave, folded her hands in her lap, and began, “Once there was an evil Queen. She was so evil everybody was afraid of her, except her youngest daughter.” Tirza gave this Queen a round, angry face, a voice like a slap, remembering the last time she had seen her mother, remembering so well that her throat thickened and she almost stopped. She forced her mind cool. She sorted rapidly through the next possibilities. “And this Princess would not yield or bend. So the Queen hated her daughter, and decided to get rid of her. But she did not intend that the Princess could be free, to do as she pleased.”

  That was the real injustice. Tirza spent some time describing the beautiful daughter, so that she could plan the next part. The daughter looked a lot like her sister Casea, with her white skin, her black eyes, rather than like Tirza herself. The feel of the words in her mouth was delicious. The dragon was utterly silent, his eyes watching her steadily, his long lips curved in a slight lizard smile.

  “So she shut the Princess into a tower by the sea, and set guards around her.” The story was growing stronger in her mind, and she let her voice stride out confidently, telling of the tower, and the wild storms that rocked it, the sunlight that warmed it, and the birds that came to sing to the Princess in her window. “There she lived lonely, singing to the birds, and grew even more beautiful, but nobody ever saw her, except, now and then, her guards.

  “But one day a Prince came by.” She made the Prince like Jeon, honest and brave. Dead now, probably, dead in this monster’s belly. Her voice trembled, but she brought herself back under control. She gave the Prince Jeon’s red hair, which she saw amused the dragon, for the wrong reason. “The Prince heard the Princess singing, and climbed up the tower wall to her window. They fell in love at once, because she was beautiful and good and he was handsome and brave and good. But before he could carry her off, the guards burst in on them.”

  The dragon twitched, and she leaned toward him, intent, excited, knowing now she had him. “The guards drew their swords, and although the Prince tried to fight back, he had no weapon, and he was one against four. So they got him down quickly, and they sent for the Queen.”

  The dragon growled. Tirza kept her voice even and slow, rhythmic, speaking each word precisely over the rumble: this was the best part. “The Queen came at once, riding on the ocean waves, faster than any horse. She told the Prince, since he was such a lizard that he could scale a castle wall, he would become the greatest lizard. And she turned him into a dragon, and cast him into the sea.”

  The dragon lifted his head up and roared, not at her, but at the sky, and then quickly sank down again, his eyes blazing.

  “But the Princess. What happened to her?”

  Tirza was ready to run for the crevice, if this did not suit. She met the dragon eye to eye. “Her heart was broken. She fled from her mother and the tower—”

  “Good.”

  “And now she wanders through the world looking for her Prince. Only her love can change him back. But every day she grows older, and every day, the dragon grows more like a dragon, and less like the Prince.”

  She was poised to run. But the dragon’s eyes were shining. His long lips drew back from his dagger-teeth, and he nodded his head once. Turning, he bounded into the lagoon and disappeared in a whirling eddy.

  She went cautiously out onto the open sand. From the cliff a little farther on a long spill of water fell, and she went there and quenched her thirst, all the while looking for some other way out of the lagoon. The towering black cliff enclosed it like a wall. She looked up, wondering if she could climb it, but she could see no path on the sheer face.

  In the lagoon, too soon, the water churned and the dragon’s head rose through the slosh of his passage and he swam to the beach and strode up onto the sand. In his jaws he held a flopping green sea bass, which he flung down before her.

  “Eat.” The voice like speaking bronze.

  She recoiled; the fish was still flopping, its desperate glistening eye on her. She cast around quickly for wood for a fire. “I need to cook it—”

  He growled. “You should eat your food alive. But wait.” He reared his head back and shot forth a bolt of flame, which blasted around the fish for several seconds, until it lay utterly still.

  She went warily up to it, knelt down, and touched the carcass. Under the charred skin, the fish was nicely cooked. She peeled back the skin and ate the hot flaky white meat. It tasted a little sharp, but it was delicious.

  The dragon was crouched there, his neck folded between his shoulders, his head settled above his forepaws, watching her. When she was done, and sitting there licking her fingers, he settled down around her, stretched his head out along his forepaws, and swung his tail in a long curve, so she stood in the middle of his coil. Half embrace, half prison. The great red eye blinked once in a flash of gold. “Tell me another story.”

  * * *

  After that she could roam as she pleased around the lagoon, as long as she told the dragon stories whenever he asked. She told him everything she knew about her family, weaving all that together, how in the beginning the sea’s youngest daughter, Atla, came ashore at the tip of the land, where Cape of the Winds jutted into the endless sea. Wise and kind and merry, she drew every creature to her.

  She lured even the monster Hafgavra, the Mist from the Sea, who seized her with his many arms and carried her into his cave above the battering tides and forced her to lie with him. After, when he lay sated, she cut out his two hearts with a clamshell. As he died, his body turned to black rock, and calling up all the creatures to help her, she built her castle of him. His enormous belly was the center of it, and his yawning mouth the hall, open to the sea. Of his many arms she raised four straight up as towers into the sky and wound the rest around as corridors through the rock. And there she lived, and there of the rape by Hafgavra she bore a son, the monster Atlarro, who became the first King of Castle Ocean.

  Atlarro married a human woman, and their son, Lukala, had the guise of a man, but he kept the heart of the monster. And all after, his descendants had hair as red as Hafgavra’s red heart’s blood.

  Of all this Tirza made stories. As the generations piled one on another, like the rocks of Castle Ocean, King followed on King, rescuing Princesses, punishing the wicked, battling monsters in the sea, chasing pirates, and defending his people, stories sprouting and intertwining, growing on one another. She fed all these stories to the dragon, except one.

  That was the last part, the newest, how to the east the Empire was growing, spreading over the land, grinding out evil and death, until at last it reached the sea. Then her father, King Reymarro, called up all his friends and kinsmen to fight. But the Emperor lured them away from the ocean and in the mountains destroyed them.

  There was no way to tell this well. She thought this story was not over yet.

  One day ran after another. When the winter storms blew by and rain fell and the wind howled above the lagoon, the dragon made fires for her in her cave. He brought her fish, well cooked, and every day she told him stories. She loved the words, their feel in her mouth, their power over him, how they held him utterly rapt, all his strength and rage suspended on her breath. But the more stories she told, the more she longed for Jeon and Luka, Casea and her other sister Mervaly, and even for her mother, and for Castle Ocean on its cliff, where she belonged.

  She was sitting in the sun one afternoon, thinking of Jeon and Luka, of her sisters, even of her mother, and tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  The dragon said, “What’s the matter? Why are you sad?”

  “You ate my brother,” she said bitterly. “I
hate you.”

  He gave one of his throaty chuckles, unperturbed. “You eat the fish. You don’t care about their brothers.”

  She cast off the thought of fish, which she had always eaten. “Do you have no family? No home but here? Where did you come from?”

  He looked surprised. His huge eyes blazed red as the heart of a fire. “I was always here.” But his stare shifted, and as much of a look of perplexity as she had ever seen came over his long reptile face. “I was always alone. Until you came. Now something has changed. I just realized this.” He turned, and disappeared into the lagoon. She got up, and walked along the beach looking for something else to eat.

  During the day he slept in the sun, or went down into the lagoon and was gone for a long while. She guessed he went out the tunnel under the cliff, to the open sea, and hunted. She wandered the beach, drinking from the waterfall, eating the berries that grew down the steep, rough wall of the cliff, and gathering sea lettuce, crabs, and clams. She worked out stories as she walked, saving bits and pieces when she could not make them whole. She thought of new words, and new patterns of words; she saw in her mind the pictures made of the words, and saved everything to tell to him.

  When he came back, he always had a fish for her and cooked it with the fire of his breath; no matter what the fish—bass, tuna, or shark—the meat always had a faintly tart, spicy taste. If he had fed well he burped up lots of stones, some as big as her fist, most toe sized or smaller, crystals of red and blue and green. If he had eaten nothing or not enough, he complained and glowered at her and licked his lips at her and talked of eating her instead, his red eyes wicked, and his tongue flickering.

  “I don’t have to listen to you,” she said, holding herself very straight. She turned back toward her crevice, where she could get away from him.

  Behind her, the deep rumbling voice said, “If you try to escape I will definitely eat you.”

  She spun toward him. “But I want to go home. Someday, when I’ve done enough, you have to let me go home.”