Dragonfield
Authors: Jane Yolen
and Other Stories
Jane Yolen
FOR THE DISTAFF NAGERIE:
Joanne Burger, Bev Clark, Lisa Cowan, Debra Doyle, Amy Falkowitz, Signe Landon, Christine Lowentrout, Alice Morigi, Joyce Peterson, Paula Sigman, Anna Vargo, Donya White, Mary Frances Zambreno, Jane Jewell, Sallijan Snyder, Gail Weiss
and of course
Diana Wynne Jones
Introduction by Patricia A. McKillip
Happy Dens, or A Day in the Old Wolves Home
“W
HAT IS A HEART?” A
child asks in one of Jane Yolen’s stories, and is answered: “A vastly overrated part of the body.”
Some days, sure. But Jane’s tales themselves do seem to spring to the eye with wondrous simplicity, and from there, with the fearless and awesome language of dreams, into the heart of childhood.
In the tradition of legends and myths and unbowdlerized old fairytales, her stories make no promises, guarantee no happy endings. They present worlds which alter under our eyes like the shapes of clouds. Image flows into image: the tree becomes a lover, the ribbon of gray hair becomes a silver road out of torment, the tears become flowers, the old drunk on the beach becomes the god of the sea. Each image is a gift, without explanation. The old woman on the roadside hands the poor woodsman an apple of gold. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Who knows? The value lies in its appropriateness: the gift, the image, the transformation comes when, in the reader’s heart, it feels most right. And that, to me, is the most special quality of Jane’s fantasy. It
feels
true, inarguable as the unreasonable reason of dreams.
The first book of Jane’s I bought, years ago, was
The Girl Who Cried Flowers,
a book which looks as lovely as it reads. Since then, I’ve been exposed to rather different moods of her work, and, to my pleasure, to Jane herself. A woman sitting on a bed in the Claremont Hotel, surrounded by apples and wine-bottles, giving a brisk, intelligent critique of a litter of fantasy-jackets—well, I know storytellers don’t necessarily match their stories, but Jane seems to preserve an almost formidable balance between two worlds. Wife, mother of three, teacher—Where could the poet have a chance to preserve herself except in the regenerative solitude of that “vastly overrated part?”
My impressions of both her and her work have gotten more complex. She hates snakes, gets hung-over on two inches of wine, and can break records on the New Haven to Staten Island run driving an old station wagon and making bad puns at the same time. She lives in a Massachusetts farmhouse, has taught at Smith College, has acquired a Golden Kite Award, and threatened to acquire a National Book Award. She has written over seventy books. Among her latest are the bitter-sweet adult collection,
Tales of Wonder,
a novel,
Cards of Grief,
in which the sophisticated trappings of science fiction and the darker wisdom and intuitions of fantasy intermingle to provide another fine adult drama; and
Heart’s Blood,
a sequel to
Dragon’s Blood.
On top of all that, she is kindly, she can make you fall off your chair laughing, and she is well beloved by librarians, teachers and classrooms full of young students parched for a story.
If I had a hat on, it would be off to you, Jane. Birds would fly out of it, they would turn into flowers, and fall down the face of a young girl in one of your stories, who would collect them in her apron and give them to you, from me. …
Oh, well, I don’t have a hat on. So I’ll just raise two inches of wine and say, “Here’s to you, Dream Weaver!”
Patricia A. McKillip,
San Francisco, California
1984
T
HERE IS A SPIT OF
land near the farthest shores of the farthest islands. It is known as Dragonfield. Once dragons dwelt on the isles in great herds, feeding on the dry brush and fueling their flames with the carcasses of small animals and migratory birds. There are no dragons there now, though the nearer islands are scored with long furrows as though giant claws had been at work, and the land is fertile from the bones of the buried behemoths. Yet though the last of the great worms perished long before living memory, there is a tale still told by the farmers and fisherfolk of the isles about that last dragon.
His name in the old tongue was Aredd and his color a dull red. It was not the red of hollyberry or the red of the wild flowering trillium, but the red of a man’s life-blood spilled out upon the sand. Aredd’s tail was long and sinewy, but his body longer still. Great mountains rose upon his back. His eyes were black and, when he was angry, looked as empty as the eyes of a shroud, but when he was calculating, they shone with a false jeweled light. His jaws were a furnace that could roast a whole bull. And when he roared, he could be heard like distant thunder throughout the archipelago.
Aredd was the last of his kind and untaught in the riddle-lore of dragons. He was but fierceness and fire, for he had hatched late from the brood. His brothers and sisters were all gone, slain in the famous Dragon Wars when even young dragons were spitted by warriors who had gone past fearing. But the egg that had housed Aredd had lain buried in the sand of Dragonfield years past the carnage, uncovered at last by an unnaturally high tide. And when he hatched, no one had remarked it. So the young worm had stretched and cracked the shell and emerged nose-first in the sand.
At the beginning he looked like any large lizard for he had not yet shed his eggskin, which was lumpy and whitish, like clotted cream. But he grew fast, as dragons will, and before the week was out he was the size of a small pony and his eggskin had sloughed off. He had, of course, singed and eaten the skin and so developed a taste for crackling. A small black-snouted island pig was his next meal, then a family of shagged cormorants flying island to island on their long migration south.
And still no one remarked him, for it was the time of great harvests brought about by the fertilization of the rich high tides, and everyone was needed in the fields: old men and women, mothers with their babes tied to their backs, young lovers who might have slipped off to the far isle to tryst. Even the young fishermen did not dare to go down to the bay and cast off while daylight bathed the plants and vines. They gave up their nets and lines for a full two weeks to help with the
stripping,
as the harvest was called then. And by night, of course, the villagers were much too weary to sail by moonlight to the spit.
Another week, then, and Aredd was a dull red and could trickle smoke rings through his nostrils, and he was the size of a bull. His wings, still crumpled and weak, lay untested along his sides, but his foreclaws, which had been as brittle as shells at birth, were now as hard as golden oak. He had sharpened them against the beach boulders, leaving scratches as deep as worm runnels. At night he dreamed of blood.
The tale of Aredd’s end, as it is told in the farthest islands, is also the tale of a maiden who was once called Tansy after the herb of healing but was later known as Areddiana, daughter of the dragon. Of course it is a tale with a hero. That is why there are dragons, after all: to call forth heroes. But he was a hero in spite of himself and because of Tansy. The story goes thus:
There were three daughters of a healer who lived on the northern shore of Medd, the largest isle of the archipelago. Although they had proper names, after the older gods, they were always called by their herbal names.
Rosemary, the eldest, was a weaver. Her face was plain but honest-looking, a face that would wear well with time. Her skin was dark as if she spent her days out in the sun, though, in truth, she preferred the cottage’s cold dirt floors and warm hearth. Her mouth was full but she kept it thin. She buffed the calluses on her hands to make them shine. She had her mother’s gray eyes and her passion for work, and it annoyed her that others had not.
Sage was the beauty, but slightly simple. She was as golden as Rosemary was brown, and brushed her light-filled hair a full hundred strokes daily. When told to she worked, but otherwise preferred to stare out the window at the sea. She was waiting, she said, for her own true love. She had even put it in rhyme.
Glorious, glorious, over the sea,
My own true love will come for me.
She repeated it so often they all believed it to be true.
Tansy was no special color at all; rather she seemed to blend in with her surroundings, sparkling by a stream, golden in the sunny meadows, mouse-brown within the house. She was the one who was a trouble to her mother: early walking and always picking apart things that had been knit up with great care just to see what made them work. So she was named after the herb that helped women in their times of trouble. Tansy. It was hoped that she would grow into her name.
“Where
is
that girl?” May-Ma cried.
Her husband, crushing leaves for a poultice, knew without asking which girl she meant. Only with Tansy did May-Ma’s voice take on an accusatory tone.
“I haven’t seen her for several hours, May-Ma,” said Rosemary from the loom corner. She did not even look up but concentrated on the marketcloth she was weaving.
“That Tansy. She is late again for her chores. Probably dreaming somewhere. Or eating some new and strange concoction.” May-Ma’s hands moved on the bread dough as if preparing to beat a recalcitrant child. “Some day, mind you, some day she will eat herself past your help, Da.”
The man smiled to himself. Never would he let such a thing happen to his Tansy. She had knowledge, precious, god-given, and nothing she made was past his talents for healing. Besides, she seemed to know instinctively how far to taste, how far to test, and she had a high tolerance for pain.
“Mind you,” May-Ma went on, pounding the dough into submission, “Now, mind you, I’m not saying she doesn’t have a Gift. But Gift or no, she has chores to do.” Her endless repetitions had begun with the birth of her first child and had increased with each addition to the family until now, three live children later (she never mentioned the three little boys buried under rough stones at the edge of the garden), she repeated herself endlessly. “Mind you, a Gift is no excuse.”
“I’m minding, May-Ma,” said her husband, wiping his hands on his apron. He kissed her tenderly on the head as if to staunch the flow of words, but still they bled out.
“If she would remember her chores as well as she remembers dreams,” May-Ma went on, “As well as she remembers the seven herbs of binding, the three parts to setting a broken limb, the …”
“I’m going, May-Ma,” whispered her husband into the flood, and left.
He went outside and down a gentle path winding towards the river, guessing that on such a day Tansy would be picking cress.
The last turn opened onto the river and never failed to surprise him with joy. The river was an old one, its bends broad as it flooded into the great sea. Here and there the water had cut through soft rock to make islets that could be reached by poleboat or, in the winter, by walking across the thick ice. This turning, green down to the river’s edge, was full of cress and reeds and even wild rice carried from the Eastern lands by migrating birds.