McKillip, Patricia A - The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbrea

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THE HARROWING OF THE DRAGON OF HOARSBREATH

Patricia A. McKillip

[07 feb 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

Winner of the first World Fantasy Award for best novel (1975), for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld,

Patricia McKillip went on to write the popular "Riddle-Master of tied" trilogy, as well as a number of

books for younger readers. She rarely writes short stories. This one, however, is an interesting science

fantasy about dragon-killing on another planet (a tradition that goes back to E. R. Eddison 's fantasies set

on the planet Mercury, especially The Worm Ouroboros). Beware of sincere young men who offer

salvation: The solution they have may well be worse than the problem.

Once, on the top of a world, there existed the ring of an island named Hoarsbreath, made out of gold

and snow. It was all mountain, a grim, briney, yellowing ice-world covered with winter twelve months

out of thirteen. For one month, when the twin suns crossed each other at the world's cap, the snow melted

from the peak of Hoarsbreath. The hardly trees shrugged the snow off their boughs, and sucked in light

and mellow air, pulling themselves toward the suns. Snow and icicles melted off the roofs of the miners'

village; the snow-tunnels they had dug from house to tavern to storage barn to mineshaft sagged to the

ground; the dead-white river flowing down from the mountain to the sea turned blue and began to move

again. Then the miners gathered the gold they had dug by firelight out of the chill, harsh darkness of the

deep mountain, and took it downriver, across the sea to the mainland, to trade for food and furs, tools and

a liquid fire called worm-spoor, because it was gold and bitter, like the leavings of dragons. After three

swallows of it, in a busy city with a harbor frozen only part of the year, with people who wore rich furs,

kept horses and sleds to ride in during winter, and who knew the patterns of the winter stars since they

weren't buried alive by the snow, the miners swore they would never return to Hoarsbreath. But the gold

waiting in the dark, secret places of the mountain-island drew at them in their dreaming, lured them back.

For two hundred years after the naming of Hoarsbreath, winter followed winter, and the miners lived

rich isolated, precarious lives on the pinnacle of ice and granite, cursing the cold and loving it, for it kept

lesser folk away. They mined, drank, spun tales, raised children who were sent to the mainland when they

were half-grown, to receive their education, and find easier, respectable lives. But always a few children

found their way back, born with a gnawing in their hearts for fire, ice, stone, and the solitary pursuit of

gold in the dark.

Then, two miners' children came back from the great world and destroyed the island.

They had no intention of doing that. The younger of them was Peka Krao. After spending five years

on the mainland, boring herself with schooling, she came back to Hoarsbreath to mine. At seventeen, she

was good-natured and sturdy, with dark eyes, and dark, braided hair. She loved every part of Hoarsbreath,

even its chill, damp shafts at midwinter and the bone-jarring work of hewing through darkness and stone

to unbury its gold. Her instincts for gold were uncanny: she seemed to sense it through her fingertips

touching bare rock. The miners called her their good luck. She could make wormspoor, too, one of the

few useful things she had learned on the mainland. It lost its bitterness, somehow, when she made it: it

aged into a rich, smokey gold that made the miners forget their sore muscles, and inspired marvellous

tales out of them that whittled away at the endless winter.

She met the Dragon-Harrower one evening at a cross-section of tunnel between her mother's house

and the tavern. She knew all the things to fear in her world: a rumble in the mountain, a guttering torch in

the mines, a crevice in the snow, a crack of ice underfoot. There was little else she couldn't handle with a

soft word or her own right arm. Even when he loomed out of the darkness unexpectedly into her taper-

light, she wasn't afraid. But he made her stop instinctively, like an animal might stop, faced with

something that puzzled its senses.

His hair was dead-white, with strands bright as wormspoor running through it; his eyes were the

light, hard blue of dawn during suns-crossing. Rich colors flashed out of him everywhere in her light:

from a gold knife-hilt and a brass pack buckle; from the red ties of his cloak that were weighted with

ivory, and the blue and silver threads in his gloves. His heavy fur cloak was closed, but she felt that if he

shifted, other colors would escape from it into the cold, dark air. At first she thought he must be ancient:

the taper-fire showed her a face that was shadowed and scarred, remote with strange experience, but no

more than a dozen years older than hers.

"Who are you?" she breathed. Nothing on Hoarsbreath glittered like that in midwinter; its colors were

few and simple: snow, damp fur and leather, fire, gold.

"I can't find my father," he said. "Lule Yarrow."

She stared at him, amazed that his colors had their beginnings on Hoarsbreath. "He's dead." His eyes

widened slightly, losing some of their hardness. "He fell in a crevice. They chipped him out of the ice at

suns-crossing, and buried him six years ago."

He looked away from her a moment, down at the icy ridges of tramped snow. "Winter." He broke the

word in two, like an icicle. Then he shifted his pack, sighing. "Do they still have wormspoor on this ice-

tooth?"

"Of course. Who are you?"

"Ryd Yarrow. Who are you?"

"Peka Krao."

"Peka. I remember. You were squalling in somebody's arms when I left."

"You look a hundred years older than that," she commented, still puzzling, holding him in her light,

though she was beginning to feel the cold. "Seventeen years you've been gone. How could you stand it,

being away from Hoarsbreath so long? I couldn't stand five years of it. There are so many people whose

names you don't know, trying to tell you about things that don't matter, and the flat earth and the blank

sky are everywhere. Did you come back to mine?"

He glanced up at the grey-white ceiling of the snow-tunnel, barely an inch above his head. "The sky

is full of stars, and the gold wake of dragon-flights," he said softly. "I am a Dragon-Harrower. I am

trained and hired to trouble dragons out of their lairs. That's why I came back here."

"Here. There are no dragons on Hoarsbreath." His smile touched his eyes like a reflection of fire

across ice. "Hoarsbreath is a dragon's heart."

She shifted, her own heart suddenly chilled. She said tolerantly. "That sounds like a marvellous tale

to me."

"It's no tale. I know. I followed this dragon through centuries, through ancient writings, through

legends, through rumors of terror and deaths. It is here, sleeping, coiled around the treasures of

Hoarsbreath. If you on Hoarsbreath rouse it, you are dead. If I rouse it, I will end your endless winter."

"I like winter." Her protest sounded very small, muted within the thick snow-walls, but he heard it.

He lifted his hand, held it lightly against the low ceiling above his head.

"You might like the sky beyond this. At night it is a mine of lights and hidden knowledge."

She shook her head. "I like close places, full of fire and darkness. And faces I know. And tales spun

out of wormspoor. If you come with me to the tavern, they'll tell you where your father is buried, and give

you lodgings, and then you can leave."

"I'll come to the tavern. With a tale."

Her taper was nearly burned down, and she was beginning to shiver. "A dragon." She turned away

from him. "No one will believe you anyway."

"You do."

She listened to him silently, warming herself with wormspoor, as he spoke to the circle of rough, fire-

washed faces in the tavern. Even in the light, he bore little resemblance to his father, except for his broad

cheekbones and the threads of gold in his hair. Under his bulky cloak, he was dressed as plainly as any

miner, but stray bits of color still glinted from him, suggesting wealth and distant places.

"A dragon," he told them, "is creating your winter. Have you ever asked yourselves why winter on

this island is nearly twice as long as winter on the mainland twenty miles away? You live in dragon's

breath, in the icy mist of its bowels, hoarfrost cold, that grips your land in winter the way another dragon's

breath might burn it to flinders. One month out of the year, in the warmth of suns-crossing, it looses its

ring-grip on your island, slides into the sea, and goes to mate. Its ice-kingdom begins to melt. It returns,

loops its length around its mountain of ice and gold. Its breath freezes the air once more, locks the river

into its bed, you into your houses, the gold into its mountain, and you curse the cold and drink until the

next dragon-mating." He paused. There was not a sound around him. "I've been to strange places in this

world, places even colder than this, where the suns never cross, and I have seen such monsters. They are

ancient as rock, white as old ice, and their skin is like iron. They breed winter and they cannot be killed.

But they can be driven away, into far corners of the world where they are dangerous to no one. I'm trained

for this. I can rid you of your winter. Harrowing is dangerous work, and usually I am highly paid. But I've

been looking for this ice-dragon for many years, through its spoor of legend and destruction. I tracked it

here, one of the oldest of its kind, to the place where I was born. All I ask from you is a guide."

He stopped, waiting. Peka, her hands frozen around her glass, heard someone swallow. A voice rose

and faded from the tavern-kitchen; sap hissed in the fire. A couple of the miners were smiling; the others

looked satisfied and vaguely expectant, wanting the tale to continue. When it didn't, Kor Flynt, who had

mined Hoarsbreath for fifty years, spat wormspoor into the fire. The flame turned a baleful gold, and then

subsided. "Suns-crossing," he said politely, reminding a scholar of a scrap of knowledge children acquired

with their first set of teeth, "cause the seasons."

"Not here," Ryd said. "Not on Hoarsbreath. I've seen. I know."

Peka's mother Ambris leaned forward. "Why," she asked curiously, "would a miner's son become a

dragon harrower?" She had a pleasant, craggy face; her dark hair and her slow, musing voice were like

Peka's. Peka saw the Dragon-Harrower ride between two answers in his mind. Meeting Ambris' eyes, he

made a choice, and his own eyes strayed to the fire.

"I left Hoarsbreath when I was twelve. When I was fifteen, I saw a dragon in the mountains east of

the city. Until then, I had intended to come back and mine. I began to learn about dragons. The first one I

saw burned red and gold under the suns' fire; it swallowed small hills with its shadow. I wanted to call it,

like a hawk. I wanted to fly with it. I kept studying, meeting other people who studied them, seeing other

dragons. I saw a night-black dragon in the northern deserts; it scales were dusted with silver, and the

flame that came out of it was silver. I saw people die in that flame, and I watched the harrowing of that

dragon. It lives now on the underside of the world, in shadow.

We keep watch on all known dragons. In the green mid-world belt, rich with rivers and mines, forests

and farmland, I saw a whole mining town burned to the ground by a dragon so bright I thought at first it

was sun-fire arching down to the ground. Someone I loved had the task of tracking that one to its cave,

deep beneath the mine-shafts. I watched her die, there. I nearly died. The dragon is sealed into the bottom

of the mountain, by stone and by words. That is the dragon which harrowed me." He paused to sip

wormspoor. His eyes lifted, not to Ambris, but to Peka. "Now do you understand what danger you live in?

What if one year the dragon sleeps through its mating-time, with the soft heat of the suns making it

sluggish from dreaming? You don't know it's there, wrapped around your world. It doesn't know you're

there, stealing its gold. What if you sail your boats full of gold downriver and find the great white bulk of

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THEHARROWINGOFTHEDRAGONOFHOARSBREATHPatriciaA.McKillip[07feb2002—scanned,proofedandreleasedfor#bookz]WinnerofthefirstWorldFantasyAwardforbestnovel(1975),forTheForgottenBeastsofEld,PatriciaMcKillipwentontowritethepopular"Riddle-Masteroftied"t ilogy,aswellasanumberofbooksforyoungerreaders.Sherarelywr...

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McKillip, Patricia A - The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbrea

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